With Exit Ghost, Philip Roth nearly completes a fictional journey begun fifty years ago. Then, his subject was coming of age; now, it is going of age. Then, it asserted ramrod sex as a vital component of self; now, it must watch the self crumble with the body, as that vital component limps off into exile. Roth’s various surrogates, their Jewish IDs cut into their flesh, have located self largely within the body, and have chafed at desire lingering beyond sexual capacity. Novelist Nathan Zuckerman’s circumcised flesh has monitored his own and his characters’ entries into pastoral America. But, for the last four Zuckerman novels, Nathan has been left impotent and incontinent by surgery for prostate cancer. We meet him here at age seventy- one, self-isolated in grief over his inevitable decrepitude, reviewing his own ghostly crossings of the shadow lines that separate the ages of man. Tempted briefly to write himself back across a line into the fullness of life, he is finally forced by physical reality to exit into the killing field that is old age.
Cancer — sick cells overwhelming healthy cells — infests Exit Ghost, infiltrating the human body, the body politic, the world of publishing, where the corpus of a serious writer’s work can be eaten away by scandal-biography. It is not a new image. Roth gives cancer-stricken women with strong senses of self key roles throughout his later fiction, most notably in Deception (1990), Sabbath’s Theater (1995), and The Dying Animal (2001). Their sexuality is part of their strength, a defense against the body’s counter-flow toward death. In losing them Roth’s protagonists lose a part of themselves that has thrived in reciprocal endearment. Desire for that physical dimension does not reduce these women to objects, the easy charge of surface feminists; rather, it adds a power to their self-awareness that makes them rich and their loss impoverishing to their men. Illness in Roth’s men, if it does not kill, moves them across a shadow line into diminished virility and intimations of ever-nearing mortality. In this novel Nathan will meet a cancer-depleted former object of his desire and a healthy young stimulus impossible to obtain.
After eleven years of living in plastic-lined diaper pads in his wooded Berkshire cabin safe from social embarrassment, Nathan has learned to ignore the great world, like his first literary hero, E. I. Lonoff of The Ghost Writer (1979). But inexplicably, against his own reason, he succumbs to medical hype for a partial sphincter restoration and drives to New York for treatment. The city quickens his social pulse and he answers an ad for a swap of homes with a young Upper West Side couple, would-be fiction writers. Jamie is a Texas-oil-heiress-turned-Democrat determined to escape another 9/11 strike on the city by finding a retreat in the country. Billy is Jewish, uxorious, transfixed, as Nathan will be, by the relaxed sexuality of his wife. The story takes place during the eve of and day following the Bush 2004 election victory.
The plot has a back story in The Ghost Writer (1979), where Nathan, then a fledgling writer, had spent a night at the house of E. I. Lonoff. He had overheard Lonofff’s sexual encounter with young Amy Bellette, whom Nathan then ghost wrote into the role of a surviving Anne Frank, a potential bride who would restore his standing among Jews. Lonoff, never a novelist but arguably the world’s best short story writer, hasn’t been read for decades. He had lived through his dying years with Amy. Now, in a Mt. Sinai Hospital cafeteria, Nathan spies the object of his youthful fantasy, already in her mid-seventies, drawn, wrinkled, cancer-reduced, a side of her head scarred and shaven. Later, he is reached on his hotel phone by Kliman, a young aggressive would-be biographer of Lonoff, who has gotten Nathan’s number from a former lover, and friend, Jamie. He and the young couple had heard Zuckerman lecture on Lonoff at Harvard over a decade before, and Jamie sees Kliman’s biographic ambition as consistent with Nathan’s veneration. Kliman has a manuscript of an aborted Lonoff novel, the old master’s one misstep out of his true genre, and finds in it grounds for alleging a brother-sister incestuous episode in Lonoff’s youth. He has also been hectoring Amy for more material, but she will have none of Kliman’s pick-axing Lonoff’s hallowed ground. Kliman gives Amy Nathan’s number in hopes of using him to soften her resistance. Nathan, who recognizes the incest device as but a failed borrowing from Nathaniel Hawthorne and who stands on principle for authorial privacy, joins forces with Amy — two weak straws against the publishing world’s sick winds of change.
When Zuckerman here meets Amy Bellette, she is beyond sexual availability and he beyond performance in more than fantasy. But his subversive talent for imagining silver linings and their combined septuagenarian failings of memory provide not only conflict with the death march but also humor, however grim. In a final nod to Eros, Nathan fantasizes an affair with Jamie, even goes so far as to invite her to his hotel, but settles for composing scenes for a play called “He and She” — a set of plot-suspending insertions— in which he probes her vulnerability and develops their relationship to the brink of fruition. Then in a comic stroke, his physical reality (the medical procedure has been worthless) mocks his desire, aborts the play, and ends the novel with Nathan retreating to his woods.
The richness of Exit Ghost resides deep inside the shell of its plot. Roth has always been an interior narrator, engaging ideas, having protagonists question their own first conclusions, commit acts they have just declared ridiculous, or defend inexplicable moves as just part of their being. Remember Smilesburger’s defense [Opertion Shylock (1993)]: “ ‘I did what I did to you because I did what I did to you’ and if that is not the truth, it’s as close as I know how to come to it. ‘I do what I do because I do what I do.’” Or Philip’s declaration about his writing in Deception: “I write for a simple and pathological reason — because I cannot stop myself! I write what I write the way I write it.…” Here, in a doctor’s office, Nathan utters, “I sat there because I sat there, flipping through magazines…”. Roth’s characters, long after Portnoy, resist analysis. He will not pluck out the heart of their mystery. Mostly, he honors the reader’s intelligence. His best social criticism comes indirectly, as in the metastasis of a million walking cell phones reducing a city’s mind to mumbling isolation and susceptibility to the kind of sound-bite manipulation that could swift-boat Kerry and reelect Bush.
But Roth is not always subtle about public issues. We sometimes hear his voice programming his characters on politics or handing them briefing books on background subjects. Acommon complaint about Roth’s recent fiction is its seeming over-research. Who needs to know all that stuff about gloves (American Pastoral) or wristwatches (Everyman)? When Jamie and Nathan agree on the national disaster that Bush has created, it’s hard to differentiate their voices. When Kliman and Nathan combine in a dozen pages of praise for the late George Plimpton, the tone does not modulate, though Roth gives Nathan asides about Kliman’s motives. One sometimes feels Roth is writing for history from his newly assured position as the only living writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. Yet he can playfully mock even that achievement by having the over-zealous Kliman aver that Lonoff belongs there too.
Roth’s great strength has always been in writing about what he knows in his bones. If it has tripped his critics into misreading his fiction as mere biography, that is testimony to its rich empathy. The certainty of death and the stages of decline into its final embrace are universal subjects. Roth’s realization of them in Exit Ghost is a masterful act of imagining just beyond the margin of lived experience.
Fiction
Exit Ghost
- Review
By
– November 10, 2011
Alan Cooper teaches English at York College, CUNY. Notable among his numerous contributions to periodicals, reviews, and books is his Philip Roth and the Jews (SUNY Press, 1996). His latest book is the young-adult novel Prince Paskudnyak and the Giant Bats.
Discussion Questions
Jewish literature inspires, enriches, and educates the community.
Help support the Jewish Book Council.