Escape to New York: Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth

Review by Bruce Collier November 1, 2007 Issue

Exit Ghost is Philip Roth’s ninth volume in the literary and private saga of Nathan Zuckerman, American writer. Introduced decades ago in The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman’s career has been filled with honors, quarrels, and love affairs. Zuckerman is now 71 and living in monkish retirement in New England. He rarely reads newspapers, never watches television, and owns neither cell phone, computer, nor DVD. “I continue to live in the Age of the Typewriter and have no idea what the World Wide Web is,” he says.

His life in the country consists of writing and re-reading “mainly the books that I first discovered as a student, the masterpieces of fiction whose power over me is no less....” Things are going along reasonably well when Zuckerman is diagnosed with prostate cancer. An operation leaves him impotent and incontinent. Hearing of a urologist that may be able to help with the latter condition, he travels to New York — his old stamping ground and literary arena — to undergo treatment. Likening himself to Rip Van Winkle, he begins a kind of reawakening.

Sounds like a formula for optimistic fiction. It isn’t. The story is told two ways. The first is straight narrative, first person, by Zuckerman. This is interspersed with short, play-like exchanges of dialogue between characters called “He” and “She.” The latter are fictionalizations of Zuckerman’s interactions with several people he meets in New York.

A chance reading of a classified ad while in New York leads Zuckerman to meet Jamie Logan and Billy Davidoff, a couple of young writers looking to exchange their town apartment for a place in the country. The two feel they need a year’s escape from post-9/11, second-term-Bush New York, and are delighted at the prospect of exchanging digs with a famous writer. Zuckerman’s brief visit to the city has stirred some of his former energy, especially when he spots Amy Bellette, a woman from the old days, in a cafÈ. Bellette was the lover and caretaker of E.I. Lonoff, a deceased writer who was the young Zuckerman’s mentor and literary idol. Zuckerman thinks a year back in his old haunts might do him both physical and artistic good.

Through the couple, Zuckerman also makes the acquaintance of Richard Kliman, a freelance journalist. Kliman is researching a planned biography of Lonoff, and insists that Zuckerman help him. Kliman speaks of a mysterious angle, a “great secret” about Lonoff’s past. When he reveals the secret, Zuckerman disgustedly dismisses Kliman as a parasitical tabloid writer and vows to “destroy” him.

Zuckerman is tempted to call everything off and go back into hiding, but is obsessed with Jamie Logan’s youth and beauty. He fantasizes conversations with her in which each confesses to literary and sexual attraction. He grills her for details about Kliman, who was Jamie’s lover in college. By his own admission, Zuckerman is getting fuzzy about details, and there are moments when neither he nor we are certain what is really happening and what Zuckerman has only imagined.

Zuckerman spends his time in New York gingerly re-establishing a connection with Amy Bellette, recalling his times with Lonoff, and noting all the differences he sees in the city that was once the center of his world. He alternates this with gloomy ruminations on the indignity of wearing rubber pants and absorbent pads, and whether he has written everything down in his appointment book. His first meeting with Amy — herself a recovering cancer patient — falls through when Zuckerman realizes after waiting an hour that he told Amy to meet him at a different restaurant. Later, he wonders whether it was she who got it wrong. And so on. Zuckerman’s struggle to shed or scare off Kliman also takes its toll, with the two writers — young buck and old lion — nearly coming to blows on a park bench.

As with a lot of Roth’s work, the humor alternates between the bawdy and the ironic. There’s also a lot of time spent on the writing life, particularly that of writers of the East Coast school and their pretensions, political dramatics, and petty quarrels. Neither Roth nor Zuckerman come off as nice guys, but Exit Ghost does contain a touching tribute to the late writer/actor/raconteur George Plimpton. Friend to the fictional Zuckerman and apparently the real-life Roth, the unashamedly preppie Plimpton is eulogized as a master of “participatory journalism.” Zuckerman/Roth takes nine pages out his own misery to celebrate his friend’s happy, zestful life. It has little to do with the story, but it is a classy gesture.

Zuckerman is still standing at book’s end, but I wonder if Roth will bring him around for a tenth book. Passed over yet again for this year’s Nobel Prize, Roth may be waiting for the ultimate honor before he lays this ghost to rest for good.

Exit Ghost, 292 pages, Houghton Mifflin Company. Available at bookstores, libraries and online booksellers.

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