EXIT GHOST
Philip Roth Jonathan Cape $55

I reviewed this on Radio New Zealand Natioanl this morning with Maggie Barry.

This is the ninth novel in Roth’s Zuckerman books, the first ,The Ghost Writer, having been published almost 30 years ago.
In that first book Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s alter-ego, is a young writer who has enormous admiration for the famous but reclusive writer E.I.Lonoff whom he regards as his role model.
Now in this latest book, with Lonoff long dead, and Zuckerman, after a spectacular writing career, and having become something of a recluse himself living in a remote corner of rural Connecticut, is required to go back to New York for the first time in 11 years. The reason for his visit is to see a urologist at Mount Sinai Hospital who specializes in a procedure to help men left incontinent by prostate surgery.

He is only in the city for a few days when he sees an advertisement in the New York Review of Books in which a writing couple in their early thirties wishes to swap their Upper West Side Apartment for a quiet rural retreat. He finds himself tempted by the idea, and against his better judgment he contacts them and agrees to swap homes for a year. When he goes around to meet Jamie and her husband Billie, he is smitten with Jamie. She is a beautiful, happily married woman 40 years his junior but hopes and fantasises that she will leave her husband for him. And remember, following his prostate surgery, he is both impotent & incontinent.

While in New York he meets up again with Amy Bellette, Lonoff’s former mistress, who is recovering from brain surgery. She is being hounded by a young writer who wishes to write a biography of E.I.Lonoff and soon Zuckerman is also being pursued by this young man who turns out to be a friend of Billie and Jamie.

So in chapter one, which runs to 67 pages, we meet the characters who occupy the story – Zuckerman, Billy & Jamie, Amy Bellett and the would-be biographer Richrd Kliman.

It is a pretty slender plot built largely around Zuckerman’s lust for Jamie. This is largely pretty sad stuff about aging and mortality and loneliness with the typical Roth theme of an older Jewish writer desiring a decades-younger woman. There is also a strong link between the novel and real life and one wonders how much of it is at least partly auto-biographical. Zuckerman and Roth are both in their seventies.It is set at the time of the US presidential elections when Bush beat Kerry and there is a great deal of Bush bashing which one assumes is Roth putting across his own views.

Zuckerman starts writing a dialogue between He and She in which he imagines conversations between Jamie and himself. Readers of earlier Zuckerman novels will know that this is a habit of his – complicating his life on paper while continually regarding his readers and everyone but himself a fool.

Roth is one of the great contemporary American writers, that goes without saying I guess, he has won the Pulitzer Prize and many other awards, he is probably the most decorated writer of the last quarter of the 20th century , and as much as I wanted to like this book I have to say it disappointed me.
I recall some years ago reading a memoir by the British actress Claire Bloom who lived with Roth for nearly 20 years in which she described him as a depressed and manipulative man, a serial seducer of women who had no time for anyone who didn’t rate him as a master writer.
Reading this latest novel one has to wonder how close Zuckerman and his creator are in real life.
Roth has many fans who will welcome this new book but for me it is a largely sad and melancholy work. The way the book ends one imagines there will be no more Zuckerman novels to come. I will not be especially sad about this. Zuckerman has run his course.