| The instrument for much of this raging and observing has been the fictional Nathan Zuckerman, who, since he was introduced in The Ghost Writer in 1979, has narrated some of Roth's finest books. The line between author and creation is not always clear "" like Roth himself, Zuckerman is a Jewish writer of serious literary fiction, born in 1933, and his existence has often supplied the pretext for Roth's examination of the connections between writing and life. |
| These connections are central to the plot of Roth's latest novel Exit Ghost, which is widely assumed to be Zuckerman's swansong. The book is set in late 2004, around the time of the presidential election that sees George W Bush elected to power for a second term, sending liberals around the country into a spiral of despair. As the novel opens, Zuckerman, who has been living in near-solitude in a mountain retreat for a decade, is in New York City for a medical procedure. An unexpected series of encounters deter him from returning to his self-imposed exile and after impulsively agreeing to swap homes with a young couple, Billy and Jamie, he becomes smitten by the latter. Around the same time, he is contacted by a brash young biographer claiming to know the "great secret" of the life of the late E I Lonoff, who was Zuckerman's first literary hero back in the 1950s. Fiercely resistant to what he sees as the exploitation of a dead writer's personal life to provide a key to his work, Zuckerman finds himself "back in the drama, back in the turmoil, back into the turmoil of events...wanting to be with people again and have a fight again..." |
| But is he up for the fight? Roth's last book, the slim Everyman, dealt with approaching mortality and coming to terms with the disintegration of one's body. Zuckerman's physical condition in Exit Ghost furthers the theme: having had his prostate removed, he is now suffering from incontinence and its attendant humiliations ("You smell like death!" shouts a youngster with whom he's had an argument. What could he know, Zuckerman reflects: "All I smelled of was urine"), in addition to being impotent. Worst of all for a writer, he is losing his memory "" so that he might wake up with little recollection of the thought processes that led him to write something the previous night. All this adds urgency to his last stab at "being in the world...taking it on" and also brings poignancy to his meeting, after nearly 50 years, with Lonoff's former mistress Amy Bellette, a once-beautiful woman now ravaged by brain cancer. |
| If Exit Ghost isn't a consistently satisfying work, that's partly because of the demands of its meta-fictional narrative: Roth demonstrates his protagonist's waning powers through a series of embarrassingly trite conversations that Zuckerman imagines between himself and Jamie, and while one gets the point, the fact remains that these passages take up a lot of space. But even a lesser Roth can be more stimulating than the work of most other writers, and there's much here to savour, not least the arguments between Zuckerman and his young nemesis, and an essay-within-the-book denouncing the laziness of "cultural journalism"("tabloid gossip disguised as an interest in the arts"). On this evidence, there are more goodies to come. Nathan Zuckerman might be done and dusted, but Philip Roth, now 74 and still powering along, still has a few more ghosts to show the door. |
| EXIT GHOST |
| Philip Roth Jonathan Cape 292 pages; Rs 660 |
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