Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #187506 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Amazon.com Review
The last ordeal of Nathan Zuckerman, the indomitable literary adventurer of Roth's nine Zuckerman books, like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age.

Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jamie, whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body.

The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman's youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman's first literary hero, E. I. Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman depleted by illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere American writer who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing vocation.

The third connection is with Lonoff's would-be biographer, a young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff's "great secret." Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.

Haunted by Roth's earlier work The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost is an amazing leap into yet another phase in this great writer's insatiable commitment to fiction.

Exit Zuckerman: Talking with Philip Roth

When we talked with Philip Roth for the Amazon Wire podcast, we asked him about his long relationship with his fictional surrogate, Nathan Zuckerman, his decision to bring Zuckerman back (and say goodbye to him) in Exit Ghost, and the difficulties of aging for novelists, and we managed to touch on George Plimpton, Annie Dillard, Grace Paley, and The Tempest, along with nearly all of the nine Zuckerman books. You can listen to interview in the podcast above, or read the full transcript.

Zuckerman Returns to Manhattan: Philip Roth Reads from Exit Ghost

When Nathan Zuckerman returns to Manhattan from his self-imposed rural retreat for the first time in 11 years in Exit Ghost, what does he find? Along with his surprising and unsettling encounters with an aged and ill woman who had once been a young mystery to him, an aggressive biographer who won't take no for an answer, and an alluring young writer who tempts him back into the adventure of seduction, he is confronted with a city whose streets are filled with people behaving quite differently than a decade before. "For one who frequently went without talking to anyone for days at a time," he thinks. "I had to wonder what that had previously held them up had collapsed in people to make incessant talking into a telephone preferable to walking about under no one's surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating the street through one's animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of a city inspire." Listen to Philip Roth read an excerpt from Exit Ghost.

Looking Back on Zuckerman

The Ghost Writer: Introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer who spends a night in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff, and meets a haunting young woman whom he imagines could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution.	Zuckerman Unbound: Zuckerman, with newfound fame as a bestselling author, ventures onto the streets of Manhattan in the final year of the turbulent '60s, where he is assumed by fans and enemies to be his own fictional satyr, Gilbert Carnovsky ("Hey, you do all that stuff in that book?").	The Anatomy Lesson: At 40, Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious affliction--pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit. Zuckerman is unable to write a line, but the novel provides some of the funniest and fiercest scenes in all of Roth's fiction.
The Prague Orgy: In quest of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s, where he discovers, among the oppressed writers with whom he quickly becomes embroiled, an appealingly perverse kind of heroism.	Zuckerman Bound: The latest in the Library of America's collected Roth works brings together his first Zuckerman trilogy, The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, and The Anatomy Lesson, along with the epilogue, The Prague Orgy.	The Counterlife: From New Jersey to England to the West Bank, the characters in The Counterlife, illuminated by the skeptical, enveloping intelligence of Nathan Zuckerman, are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate.
American Pastoral: Swede Levov, legendary high-school athlete and boyhood idol of Nathan Zuckerman, is wrenched overnight out of the American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk when his teenage daughter proves capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism.	I Married a Communist: The rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, takes the young Zuckerman under his wing, and is destroyed, as both a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s.	The Human Stain: Coleman Silk, an aging classics professor forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist, has a secret, kept for 50 years from all around him, including his friend Nathan Zuckerman, who sets out to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled.

From Publishers Weekly
Philip Roth's 28th book is, it seems, the final novel in the Zuckerman series, which began in 1979 with The Ghostwriter. A 71-year-old Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York after more than a decade in rural New England, ostensibly to see a doctor about a prostate condition that has left him incontinent and probably impotent. But Zuckerman being Zuckerman and Roth being Roth, the plot is much more complicated than it at first appears. Within a few days of arriving in New York, Zuckerman accidentally encounters Amy Bellette, the woman who was once the muse/wife of his beloved idol, writer S.I. Lonoff; he also meets a young novelist and promptly begins fantasizing about the writer's young and beautiful wife. There's also a subplot about a would-be Lonoff biographer, who enrages Zuckerman with his brashness and ambition, two qualities a faithful Roth reader can't help ascribing to the young, sycophantic Zuckerman himself. As usual, Roth's voice is wise and full of rueful wit, but the plot is contrived (the accidental meeting with Amy, for example, is particularly unbelievable) and the tone hovers dangerously close to pathetic. In the Rothian pantheon, this one lives closer to The Dying Animal than Everyman. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Michael Dirda

The prose is as assured and inviting as ever, but Philip Roth's latest -- and perhaps last -- novel about his alter ego, the writer Nathan Zuckerman, is in many ways a magnificent shambles, like old age itself. Exit Ghost mixes reflections on physical decline, illness and the persistence of desire with an angry sadness over the 2004 presidential election, bitter opinions about biography, and praise for the patrician grace of George Plimpton, the late editor of the Paris Review. Large chunks of the book are cast as a minimalist play -- starring "He" and "She" -- in which Zuckerman fantasizes conversations with a young woman to whom he is attracted. As in the earlier accounts of Zuckerman's career (in particular The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson and The Prague Orgy, which are now gathered together in a recent Library of America volume), Exit Ghost both encourages and undercuts the instinct to identify the life of the now reclusive Nathan Zuckerman with that of the now reclusive Philip Roth.

The opening chapter, "The Present Moment," is the most moving. Zuckerman is 71 and for the past 11 years has been living alone in the Berkshires, where he writes, rereads favorite books, listens to music and occasionally watches baseball on television. Life is manageable, and he gets on with his work. But ever since an operation for prostate cancer some nine years previously, Zuckerman has been not only impotent but also incontinent: He wears cotton pads in his plastic underwear to absorb his seeping urine. As he says, without self-pity, "What you do not have, you live without -- you're seventy-one, and that's the deal."

And it's a better deal than many have. "The habit of solitude, of solitude without anguish, had taken hold of me, and with it the pleasures of being unanswerable and being free -- paradoxically, free above all of oneself. For days on end of only work, I would feel sweetened by luxurious contentment. Loneliness, raving loneliness, was sporadic and amenable to strategy. . . . All in all, being without any need to play a role was preferable to the friction and agitation and conflict and pointlessness and disgust that, as a person ages, can render less than desirable the manifold relations that make for a rich, full life."

Though nothing can be done about Zuckerman's loss of virility, a new operation unexpectedly offers the possibility of greater bladder control, so the old writer travels back to New York City. He daydreams of rejuvenation, of simply being able to swim in a public pool: "To possess control over one's bladder -- who among the whole and healthy ever considers the freedom that bestows or the anxious vulnerability its loss can impose on even the most confident among us? I who'd never thought along these lines before, who from the age of twelve was bent on singularity and welcomed whatever was unusual in me -- I could now be like everyone else."

After leaving his doctor's office with this new hope, Zuckerman unexpectedly hears a familiar voice in the lobby, a voice from his distant past. It belongs to an old woman, wearing a dress made out of a hospital gown, with half her hair shaved off from surgery (for brain cancer, we later learn). Nearly 50 years ago, Amy Bellette was the student and then the mistress of Zuckerman's literary idol, the short story writer E.I. Lonoff. Back then, the 23-year-old Zuckerman convinced himself that this beautiful European refugee might just be the grown-up Anne Frank.

From this point on, Exit Ghost starts to work variations on themes suggested by The Ghost Writer, the very first Zuckerman novel. Zuckerman, now himself the elderly literary eminence, meets a 30-year-old short story writer, the sexy Jamie Logan, about whom he begins to daydream and write. Then he clashes with a vulgarly ambitious young man named Richard Kliman -- much like his own younger self -- who wants to make his literary reputation with a tell-all biography of E.I. Lonoff. Finally, Zuckerman spends an evening with Amy Bellette, learning about her family, the four years she spent with Lonoff and her life since his death.

These encounters prove surprisingly exhilarating to the old writer. At times Zuckerman feels that he's back in the fray, back in the thick of the world. But then, he suddenly deflates: "An aging man, his battles behind him, who suddenly feels the urge . . . to what? Once around with the passions wasn't enough? Once around with the unknowable wasn't enough? Into the mutability again?" And what of the mounting evidence of mental, as well as physical, decline? If he doesn't list names and dates and activities in his daily calendar, he is likely to forget them entirely. Even worse, he is growing convinced that he's losing his command of language and the ability to create. Try as he might, his last novel simply wouldn't come out as he wanted it:

"I discovered that I had to labor every day against the threat of incoherence. When I had finished -- when, after four drafts, that is, I could go no further -- I couldn't tell whether it was reading of the completed manuscript that was itself marred by a disordered mind or whether my reading was accurate and the disordered mind was what was itself mirrored in the writing." As much as he loathes Kliman for wanting to reduce the artistry of E.I. Lonoff to a "dark secret" from his past -- a secret reminiscent of one attributed to the novelist Henry Roth -- Zuckerman yearns just as mightily for Jamie Logan, but to what end? He is impotent, out of touch with the times, old. His heart almost breaks with longing: "Why did I have to get cancer of the prostate? . . . Why must strength's abatement be so quick and cruel? Oh, to wish what is into what is not, other than on the page!"

As a portrait of the artist as an old man, Exit Ghost delivers pages of great, sad power. But as a work of art it feels unfocused, never quite drawing together its various threads but, in the end, simply relinquishing them. At times I wondered if Roth was practicing what has sometimes been called the fallacy of imitative form -- in this case, writing a slightly incoherent book to reflect the incoherence of his aging hero's mind. At other times, I concluded that his lack of a strong plot, the weak fantasy playlet of "He and She," the attack on the modern tendency to reduce art to a complex or an ism, and the many pages, albeit excellent in themselves, about George Plimpton were all typical of "late style," that wild freedom characteristic of great artists in old age when they blithely ignore the expected conventions and disdain the polish of ordinary form and beauty. Toward the end of life, mere "art" seems to get in the way of truth.

Yet, Zuckerman argues, the truth about a writer lies in his art, not his biography. Nonetheless, ours is an age of titillation, of Internet gossip, of journalists and critics and readers who latch on to the human failings and antics of an author while half-ignoring or dismissing the actual work in all its shaped and ruminative glory. As Zuckerman writes bitterly: "The man in control of the words, the man making up the stories all his life, winds up, after death, remembered, if at all, for a story made up about him, his covert brand of baseness discovered and described with uncompromising candor, clarity, self-certainty, with grave concern for the most delicate issues of morality, and with no small measure of delight." This being Philip Roth, Exit Ghost manages some occasional laughter in the dark ("a spotlessly virtuous person, dresses in burlap and reads only Thoreau"); and, again, this being Philip Roth, the novel is sometimes brutally sexual (the description of Jamie's past, whether imagined or actual). Above all, though, the book shows us a man trying to work with the cards that fate has dealt him -- and to accommodate himself to the diminution of his mental and physical powers. In this struggle, any of us can see our own destinies, whether we are "no-longers" or "not-yets." As Leon Trotsky, no less, said with simple truth: "Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man."

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Exit Ghost: Perhaps the Passing of Nathan Zuckerman/Philip Roth
One can only hope that EXIT GHOST is not the final page in the multiple books on the life of Nathan Zuckerman (the thinly disguised author Philip Roth). Though the principal character of nine books since 1979 is now aged 71, leading a reclusive life after the ravages of prostatic carcinoma treatments have left him incontinent and impotent, there is more than a little life in the master storyteller. Philip Roth continues his eloquent writing style in this latest book and still struggles with the enigmas of sexual obsession, distaste for current politics in this country, and the Don Quixote stance against aging and dying. And in doing so he has created a novel with fascinating characters, satisfying plot, propulsive reading style, and much food for thought!

Nathan Zuckerman, in this book, has decided to take a chance on a surgical procedure the will cure or at least improve his embarrassing urinary incontinence, one of the many reasons he has moved from New York City to a rural New England hideaway to write in solitude. But upon arrival in New York he meets a beautiful couple (Jamie and Billy), both writers, who are suffering from the after-effects of 911 and upon encountering their literary hero Zuckerman, coerce him into trading houses: Zuckerman will remain in their New York space and the couple will escape to his New England sanctuary. But other factors arise: Zuckerman meets his old friend Amy Bellette, once the lover of Zuckerman's hero writer E.I. Lenoff, and discovers Amy's resistance to allowing a young writer Richard Kliman to finish and publish a manuscript containing a dark secret of Lenoff, a manuscript he never wanted published; Zuckerman has limited success in his first incontinence surgery; Zuckerman's self imposed sexual exile is awakened in fantasies about the married Jamie, a wondrously written series of imaginary dialogs between the two. All of these complex components are succinctly woven into this 300-page book that doesn't really end, but instead tapers off into an elegy about aging.

The story is great reading: the style is pure Roth. 'The end is so immense, it is its own poetry. It requires little rhetoric. Just state it plainly'. 'Reading/writing people, we are finished, we are ghosts witnessing the end of the literary era - take this down'. Reading Roth is an enriching pastime, one to savor and relish. This is not a book to rush - this is a book to treasure, and once read, to reflect...Grady Harp, November 07

The End Of The Literary Era
In his latest creation, Roth shows that even a 71 year old incontinent and impotent Zuckerman (Roth in disguise) can still produce amazingly poignant and truly important literature. The book centers around the attempt to regain continence through a new procedure, while at the same time showing that regardless of the state of inoperative reproductive equipment, thoughts of sexuality still meander frequently and aggressively through the male mind.

At the same time, Roth indicates his feeling that we have reached the "End of the age of literature." During his stay in New York City to undergo his procedure, he becomes involved with a reporter who is planning to write a biography about a great, but all but forgotten master American short story author. It seems that the author may or may not have had a deep dark secret that he wanted buried forever. The biographer finds out what he believes is that secret, and plans to reveal it to the world.

Through the book, Roth becomes involved in great sexual fantasy with a beautiful lady half his age. Since he is unable to actually act on those thoughts, due to his physical malady, he fantasizes and creates imaginary dialogue around that particular lady and the wonders of her sensuality and sexuality.

Once again, Roth writes a wondrously autobiographical book which the reader can virtually insert himself, and feel as though he has become Roth in the text. This ability is Roth's special gift. He is able to capture his experiences and feelings and then turn them into words in a manner that is virtually universal. This ability has always characterized his writing throughout his entire career. This book is recommended for all readers, especially those over the age of 50.

Elegant, as usual...
For a glaring example of one of the main themes of "Exit Ghost" one need only read the recent Vanity Fair article about Arthur Miller's institutionalization of his Down Syndrome son. It was an article guaranteed to create a scandal; it was "cultural journalism" - tabloid gossip masquerading as literary investigation. It called into question the character of a great writer (as opposed, sadly, to the great writer's characters, who are forgotten like yesterday's garbage in the wake of a titillating gossip-fest). And, sadly, I, too, played right along. I'm addicted to Vanity Fair. It's fun to peek into the lives of the so-called "beautiful (i.e. monied) people." It's satisfying to see them picked apart for their foibles and follies, while I, an unsuccessful (meaning unpublished) writer gets a little revenge from their ill luck. "Exit Ghost" has made me feel somewhat ashamed for this character defect, which seems to be infecting multitudes in our current world. Mea culpa, Phil. Now, I'm not going to take it back - I still feel the sting of "Exit Ghost's" tongue-lashing. However - one might say that AT LEAST these kinds of stories keep the writers in the forefront of the vast, untutored American public enough that, say, someone might want to go back and read their stuff. I know it sounds like I'm hedging my bets here, but I'd be willing to say that, for instance, Arthur Miller probably picked up some fans along the
way. And another thing: at first, I condemned Miller for his cowardice. I was very angry that a literary idol of mine had fallen of his pedestal. And then - I realized that the finger of judgment was actually pointing right back to myself. I won't go into it, but suffice it to say that the article about Arthur Miller made me realize that I, too, did something once that was comparably unforgiveable and yet human. Now I love him more than ever, because we have a bond. So - there's always a lesson in everything, n'est-ce pas? May Goddess (and Mr. Roth) forgive us all, and that includes the editors of Vanity Fair.