Philip Roth’s last novel, Everyman, chronicled a man’s
descent into death after a life that taught him very little. His new
one is far sunnier: It’s about another man’s descent into a state in
which everything he knows about his limitations is painfully
reconfirmed through a spate of poor judgment.
Exit Ghost, the last great hurrah of Roth’s famous alter ego,
Nathan Zuckerman, begs the question: “Can we please get this otherwise
amazing novelist off his death trip?” Yes, dark explorations yield
profound insights, and they’re arguably inevitable for any serious
artist, but lately Roth seems content to pick at the scabs of his own
mortality.
The short of Exit Ghost is this: Nathan Zuckerman, having
forsworn the life of a famous writer, accidentally emerges from his
decade of self-imposed exile in western Massachusetts. Zuckerman sought
safety in the countryside during the 1990s, aiming to wipe out all
distractions from his literary work: no wife, no kids—just work.
Zuckerman may be a man of letters, but he’s now a man of diapers as
well. Left incontinent and impotent by prostrate surgery, he returns to
Manhattan to see an urologist who, he’s assured, can restore him to his
previous state.
So intoxicating is this specter of hope that it opens up the door to
all sorts of abandoned yearnings—like an affair with a beautiful,
decidedly unavailable woman. A significant portion of the novel is
written in the form of a play, imagined dialogue between Zuckerman and
Jamie, the 30-year-old woman whose Upper West Side apartment he
contemplates swapping for his Massachusetts home for one year.
Ultimately, Zuckerman proves incapable of living out his days as an
anchorite of letters. He knows too well that his foray into the world
is doomed to failure, and so it fails. Prostate be damned, he beats a
path back to the Berkshires and the artificial barriers he erected 11
years ago.
Zuckerman was once Roth’s sounding board for entertaining, if
indulgent, ideas about a writer and his work. The character proved much
more useful as a narrative conduit for the likes of characters like
Coleman Silk in The Human Stain or Swede Levov in American
Pastoral. So it’s sad to bid the alter ego farewell, but it’s good
riddance to his graying anxiety. Zuckerman (and Roth) are at their best
when looking backward.