Exit Ghost

June 18, 2007
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
.

August 1, 2007
In Roth's ninth installment in the Zuckerman saga, the reclusive author leaves his mountain retreat in the Berkshires to return to New York City for a promising new treatment for incontinence, a lingering reminder of his battle with prostate cancer. Almost immediately, Zuckerman is contacted by Richard Kliman, a brash young journalist who is working on a biography of the long-forgotten writer E.I. Lonoff, one of Zuckerman's mentors and the subject of Roth's first (and best) Zuckerman novel, "The Ghost Writer" (1979). Scandalous new details have emerged about Lonoff's sex life, and Kliman wants to break the story. Zuckerman resents Kliman's Zuckerman-like ambition, and argues heatedly that Lonoff's literary work is the only thing that matters. His private life is off limits. Meanwhile, Zuckerman becomes obsessed with a beautiful, wealthy young Texan and imagines an elaborate seduction, which he is simply too old and too sick to put into effect. While not one of Roth's strongest works, this novel has all the elements: unreliable narrators, authorial games, meditations on the use and abuse of literature, and a firm grounding in the reality of post-9/11 New York. Recommended for most fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 6/15/07.]Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles

Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from July 1, 2007
The ninth novel to feature famous writer Nathan Zuckerman finds Rothsclose alter-ego in the winter of his life: at age 71, sufferingthe depressing side effects of prostate surgery and living a hermits existence in rural Massachusetts, in self-imposed exile from people and technology. This agonizingly real yet gorgeously renderednovel has a relatively limited time frame: one week, when Zuckerman returns to New York City, his former home, for a surgical procedure, this event conspiring to make himbelieve he wants to regain society (having the effect of rousing the virility in me again, the virility of mind and spirit and desire and intention and wanting to be with people again and have a fight again), specificallyto pursue feminine pulchritude anew, despite his impotence and incontinence. Roth connects this latest Zuckerman novel most closely to, of all of its predecessors in the cycle, the first one, The Ghost Writer (1979); thus, the ninth one emerges as a sequel to the first.Zuckermans entr'e back into the real world, leaving behind for a whilehis hermetically sealed one on a Massachusetts mountaintop, involves significant encounters with theyoung womannow oldwho was the much-younger girlfriend of a famous novelist Zuckerman paid a lengthy call onback in 1956 (which was the material of The Ghost Writer). This novel ofrenewal inevitably becomes a taleof acceptance of ones irreversible descent to oblivion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)