Philip Roth Departs From His Past To Grapple With the Ghost of His Future

The reaction to Philip Roth’s latest novel, Exit Ghost, has been mostly positive, but muted. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, as vocal a Roth fan as any major reviewer working today, largely limited her review to a respectful plot summary and a few references to the master’s daunting catalog of great novels. Sam Anderson, writing in New York, took a crude, undergraduate approach, trumpeting the impotence of Roth’s alter ego in the novel, Nathan Zuckerman, in lieu of a comprehensive review. James Wood, in the New Yorker, gave it the full block-quote treatment and found it an improvement over Everyman, though notably did not compare it directly to the titans of Roth’s late period work, American Pastoral and The Human Stain.

This avoidance is more than just a tactical strategy to avoid unflattering comparisons.
Exit Ghost is a very different kind of book than either of those modern classics. Whereas American Pastoral and The Human Stain (as well as the 2004 bestseller The Plot Against America) are explicit attempts to explore national themes with complexity, Exit Ghost’s intentions are significantly more modest, to the point that it hardly attempts to fulfill many of the obligations expected of a novel. The novel is dominated by rumination rather than action; characters are introduced, considered thoroughly by Zuckerman, and largely left undeveloped. This is because the book is not about other people. It is about Zuckerman in his old age and, at least as far as other people are concerned, about how he perceives them rather than how they are.

The plot concerns Zuckerman’s brief return to New York City after spending years isolated in the woods of Massachusetts. He comes to the city for surgery to reduce the incontinence resulting from the removal of his prostate, and finds himself drawn into a house swap with a married writer-couple. In the city, Zuckerman deals with the annoyances of a would-be biographer of a long dead friend and grapples with lust for Jamie, the young woman of the house swap, all the while reflecting upon the indignities of old age, the role of the author, and the passing of time. He also writes a series of dialogues, entitled He and She, which imagine a gradual and playful seduction between him and Jamie. These passages are the least successful of the book. They read like an overwrought parody of early Roth dialogue, and they become tedious with repetition. It is unclear to what degree this is intended to be the case, but at any rate, it is not effective. For the most part, the action of the novel is minimal—there are less than a dozen significant encounters over the course of the narrative, and they largely serve as jumping-off points for Zuckerman’s discourses.

Roth seems largely unconcerned with the contrivances of plot, but his sentences and paragraphs are, as always, capable of exploring complex emotions and ideas with extraordinary subtlety and finesse. It is illuminating to find, interspersed throughout the rather thin plot, perfectly composed essays on subjects ranging from Bush’s re-election to the career of George Plimpton. These reflections contain the most engaging writing of the novel, but they also seem to exist outside the novel, not quite lining up with the frazzled Zuckerman voice that guides the main narrative. While Zuckerman is clearly a Roth stand-in, the fully inhabited quality of the essay moments strike the reader as direct communication from the author to the reader rather than integrated elements of the novel.

The Plimpton essay in particular is a knockout, and also the most personal element of the book. It is placed, oddly, near the end of the book, and comes in the form of an internal monologue while Zuckerman is meeting with the irritating would-be biographer. It is important to note that the subject of the biography, E.I. Lonoff, is a fictional creation, and a character reprised from The Ghost Writer, a novel to which Exit Ghost serves as something of a companion piece. The intermingling of real memories of Plimpton with the figures of Zuckerman and Lonoff is disconcerting, but Roth’s thoughts on Plimpton carry the weight of real insight. He writes:

“Therein lay George’s true brilliance, his ability to move across the class line of scrimmage, making himself, as he put it, ‘a laughingstock,’ without becoming , like George Orwell barely surviving among ‘the dregs’ as an abject Paris dishwasher and a hungry, penniless London tramp, punishingly and horribly—and in deadly earnest—a declasse. George escaped his glamour without losing his glamour, only further enhancing it in autobiographical books seemingly driven by self-deprecation.”

This is a wonderful portrait of another writer, and it gets at one of the central questions of the book: how will a writer be remembered? Zuckerman spends a great deal of time trying to protect the memory of Lonoff from his would-be biographer, and is subsequently forced to think about his own legacy and the ways in which it will be treated by future generations. Surely Roth is thinking out loud about his own legacy here, but he does so with a minimum of ponderousness. This is not the portentous, death-pondering Roth of Everyman, and contrary perhaps to what critics and readers would like to imagine, this does not read like a last will and testament. It is simply a thoughtful moving around of the pieces, a contemplative tinkering with the themes and tools that have carried Roth through the decades. It succeeds, for the most part, on the modest terms it sets out for itself, and given Roth’s previous achievements, one should not ask for more.