Shaun de Waal reviews Philip Rotha’s novel, Exit Ghost.
Exit Ghost (Jonathan Cape) is the ninth novel of Philip Roth’s to feature his novelist character Nathan Zuckerman.
As the novel opens, Zuckerman has been a recluse for 11 years and has had a prostate operation that has left him impotent and incontinent. We are told that in the second paragraph of the novel. It’s as though Roth is warning the reader that if he or she can’t deal with this messy physical stuff, he or she might as well not continue. It will get messier.
But then Roth has always been about human mess — the physical, the psychological; the sexual, romantic, spiritual mess. That goes back to Zuckerman’s first appearance, in The Ghost Writer (1979), to which, unsurprisingly, Exit Ghost has notable correspondences. In the earlier novel Zuckerman wrote an extraordinary fantastical narrative about a female character, Amy Bellette, reimagining her as the Jewish martyr-figure Anne Frank (what if she had survived the death camps?). Here Amy reappears, at the end of her life, and his — the writing life that was just beginning in The Ghost Writer. But now Zuckerman’s writerly fantasies (he fantasises by writing) are directed at another woman.
Despite himself, and despite his deep need to escape from the hurlyburly of life, Zuckerman is dragged back into it — and the business of desire, which is life itself. The plot of Exit Ghost revolves around a flat in New York, and the city is naturally a potent metaphor for life and desire, not to mention politics, literature and so forth. The events of 9/11 loom over the personal tragedies and other losses. Roth even works in a tribute to the real writer and New Yorker, George Plimpton, who died in 2003; in these passages Roth and Zuckerman are indistinguishable.
The tribute to Plimpton is reminiscent of another tribute, the one paid to Zuckerman himself — at his funeral in another Roth novel, The Counterlife (1982). For, indeed, in that novel Zuckerman died, and his brother and lover had to deal with his relicts. That novel being one of Roth’s most reflexive, though, Zuckerman was (possibly) resurrected. It also turned out that he had in fact written his own funeral eulogy.
The eulogy (ventriloquised by his fictional editor) dealt in part with the relation of reality and fantasy, which is a central one for Roth, especially when he’s using his fellow novelist Zuckerman as protagonist and/or narrator. Zuckerman had a huge fight with his father in The Ghost Writer because of family history he’d used in a story, and that argument is still simmering (now with the brother) in The Counterlife. Harry, Nathan’s brother, reaches the conclusion that the novelist’s pleasure is precisely in taking real-life stories and distorting them.
Oddly, then, a central writerly conflict at the heart of Exit Ghost is between Zuckerman (the novelist who gets into trouble for reproducing real life in his fiction) and a would-be biographer of EI Lonoff, the fiction-writer who was a key figure in The Ghost Writer — one of the contenders, along with Amy Bellette and Zuckerman himself, for filling the titular role. Zuckerman’s problem with the biographer has to do with the representation of real life, and what that lived experience and those family secrets become when they are turned into a book and made public. The distinction between novel-writing and constructing a biography is not made. Rather, the two forms are actively conflated, by both Zuckerman and the biographer. Roth gives no sign of whether he endorses that view or not. This is odd from a writer who has probed precisely that nexus, and done it repeatedly (in fiction and non-), and who responded angrily to a memoir by his ex-wife Claire Bloom. Perhaps he was just tired of going there.
In The Ghost Writer, Roth (or Zuckerman) contrasts the narrative drive of the writer of short stories, in the person of Lonoff, and his own novelistic process. Lonoff is a master of concision, of cutting back to the barest and most telling essentials, while a novelist like Zuckerman (or Roth) thrives on ‘elaboration”. Roth has always been a great elaborator, but Exit Ghost feels like it could have done with more elaboration than it got. It contains the familiar Rothian pleasures, such as sentences that suck you in to the characters’ inner compulsions through their very rolling, switchbacking form. (Roth can cover two or three pages with a single paragraph — and that’s in dialogue.) Also, having come this far with Zuckerman, it’s nice to know what’s happening to him now.
Still, there are a couple of plot strands that cry out for elaboration. They are simply dumped, in exactly the way Zuckerman, in the novel, dumps a significant manuscript in the trash can. This is deliberate, I’m sure, because after all the over-arching subject is the messiness of life, and Zuckerman at least has grown weary of its endless complications. But Roth is, in a way, the last heir of the great 19th-century novelists (especially the Russians), and I wanted more 19th-century pleasures.
Compelling though it is, Exit Ghost feels like two-thirds of the novel it could have been. I, certainly, could have done with more.