Zuckerman Unsound
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Book Review
EXIT GHOST
By Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin, 304 pages, $26
What to do when the best living American novelist writes a weak book? The New Yorker solved the problem (in the Oct. 1 issue) with an extended Q&A, allowing Hermione Lee to caress the author with feather-soft questions. That’s one way to help a writer defend his new book without even criticizing it.
Here at The Observer, we’d rather offer some helpful advice: If you want a chance to enjoy Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost, which is billed as “the last ordeal of Nathan Zuckerman,” please don’t make the mistake of doubling back to Zuckerman’s debut in The Ghost Writer (1979). The earlier novel is a triumphant demonstration of the generative power of art; the new novel is a glum catalog of “the gifts reserved for age” (Eliot’s bitter line, borrowed by Mr. Roth), incontinence and impotence among them. It can’t have been the author’s intention to let the two books serve as a before-and-after illustration of the ravages of artistic decline, but that’s sure what it looks like: Side by side with The Ghost Writer, a superbly controlled and forceful performance, Exit Ghost seems leaky and limp.
In The Ghost Writer, 23-year-old Nathan Zuckerman makes a pilgrimage to meet the great E.I. Lonoff, the writer whom Zuckerman would like to think of as his spiritual father. Zuckerman also meets Lonoff’s WASP-y, white-haired wife, Hope, and the 27-year-old Amy Bellette, a former student of Lonoff’s, now perhaps his lover. Avid young Zuckerman sucks up Lonoff’s praise (“the most compelling voice I’ve encountered in years … [B]egins at around the back of the knees and reaches well above the head”); horny young Zuckerman masturbates on the daybed in Lonoff’s study; cunning young Zuckerman invents a new identity for Amy, who’s transformed, in his imagination, into Anne Frank—an Anne Frank who survives the war, becomes E.I. Lonoff’s femme fatale and finally, in the dizzy elaboration of this fecund fantasy, marries Zuckerman. (“Heedless of Jewish feeling? Indifferent to Jewish survival? Brutish about their well-being? Who dares to accuse of such unthinking crimes the husband of Anne Frank!”)
Funny, full of yearning, fully capable of translating desire into action or art, this is Zuckerman as a pulse of energy, a bolt of fresh talent.
Fast-forward nearly half a century to the week of George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection. Meet Nathan Zuckerman, age 71, post-prostatectomy, an “eviscerated … relic” who’s been living in isolation for more than a decade on a mountain road in the Berkshires. He’s returned to Manhattan to have collagen implanted around the neck of his bladder, in the vain hope of curing his incontinence—or at least gaining “somewhat more control over my urine flow than an infant.” His irreparable erectile dysfunction weighs on his mind, especially in a city crowded with young women “clad in ways I couldn’t ignore”—in fact, his impotence seems to bother him more than his alarming memory loss, which of course threatens his ability to write.
IN THE HOSPITAL ELEVATOR, coming out of his urologist’s office, Zuckerman catches sight of Amy Bellette, now a “frail, elderly woman”—he hasn’t seen her since the night he spent at Lonoff’s in 1956. He follows her to a luncheonette, where he sees, once she’s removed her hat, that her skull bears scars consistent with brain surgery. He decides to leave her “undisturbed.”
The next night, in a rash moment, he answers an ad in The New York Review of Books: A young couple, both writers, are looking to swap for one year their Upper West Side apartment for a “quiet rural retreat.” The twin result of this snap decision is that Zuckerman finds himself overwhelmingly attracted to Jamie Logan, the female half of the scribbling couple (“She had a huge … gravitational pull on the ghost of my desire”), and that he meets Jamie’s ex-boyfriend, Richard Kliman, who’s writing a biography of the late E.I. Lonoff.
For the rest of the novel, Zuckerman fantasizes about Jamie (fruitlessly, perforce) and clashes with Kliman, who promises a shocking revelation in his biography of Lonoff. (“I assume the great secret is sexual,” quoth Zuckerman.)
The fantasies about Jamie—all talk, no action—are recorded as a play called He and She. There’s too much of it, and the two-step of older man and younger woman is dismayingly predictable.
The sparring with Kliman is more interesting, especially when Zuckerman realizes that it’s not just Kliman’s youth and sexual potency he hates but the fact that he, Nathan Zuckerman, will one day be the victim of a biographer. “An astonishing thing it is, too, that one’s prowess and achievement, such as they have been, should find their consummation in the retribution of biographical inquisition.” (Imagine how Hermione Lee liked that line!)
Also interesting—but not in a good way—is the tribute to George Plimpton that Mr. Roth drops into the narrative just like that. Plimpton was indeed a extraordinary man, and his career, a whirlwind of activity right up to his sudden death at 76, stands in startling contrast with Zuckerman’s recent hermetic existence. But why is this obit eight pages long?
No book written by Philip Roth can be without merit, and there are vibrant passages in Exit Ghost where the master’s touch is plain to see. He’s cruel, letting Zuckerman refer to himself as “a man bearing between his legs a spigot of wrinkled flesh.” He’s angry, giving voice to “the despising without remission that constitutes being a conscientious citizen in the reign of George W. Bush.” He’s compassionate, especially in his depiction of Amy Bellette, whose brain cancer has returned and who lives in squalor above a spaghetti joint on First Avenue. He’s generous, occasionally feeding Zuckerman a charming line: “One of city life’s notable satisfactions: strangers fostering the chimera of human accord by eating together in a good little restaurant.” But he’s never funny.
On the whole this is a disappointing farewell to a literary character we’ve lived with, loved and despised for nearly 30 years. Goodbye, Zuckerman.
Adam Begley is books editor of The Observer.
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The twin result of this snap decision is that Zuckerman finds himself overwhelmingly attracted to Jamie Logan, the female half of the scribbling couple.