EXIT GHOST
Philip Roth
Vintage
Fiction
Hardcover: 9780618915477
Paperback: 9780307387295

• Read an Excerpt

After living as a hermit in a forest cabin for 11 years, Nathan Zuckerman, now 71, must head to New York for surgery. A shadow of his hungrily virile, robust self, he is now unable to control his urine flow. Driven to restore some of his once-mighty phallus’s dignity, he seeks out prostate surgery. He is worn and tired; these early descriptions of his life in the cabin and the surgery are at once suavely comic and tenderly sad, while still preserving the nobility of his solitude.
 
Zuckerman sees in a classified ad that a couple is looking to swap their yuppie apartment for a cabin in the woods for one year. Rashly deciding to make the switch, he meets them and becomes boyishly infatuated with the 30-year-old wife, Jamie. Later in New York, he also meets Richard Kliman, a college boyfriend of Jamie’s who is doggedly collecting research for a book about E.I. Lonoff. Kliman etches out a secret to Zuckerman, who believes it would shatter Lonoff in the eyes of the “literary” public, a group he believes now considers muckraking tabloid news of writers to be worthy of serious cultural attention.
 
Zuckerman’s manifestation of his infatuation is done largely through fantasy. He craves moments just to be in the same room as her, even in the presence of her husband. He writes a dialogue between “he” and “she” to play out all the conversations he wishes he could have with her. Knowing the absurd fantasy he is letting himself into, considering it alongside the rash choice to move to New York, Zuckerman says of the dialogues: “If ever there was something that didn’t need doing, it’s this. Now you are taken up with her totally.” Zuckerman is never reduced to pathetic old man status, never too clingy or needy; instead, he is constantly confronted by the invigorating and destructive desires that he thought he had lost. In his own words, he is a “taunted old man dying to be whole again.” The plain and direct prose is rich with subdued emotional ennui.
 
His battle against Kliman goes similarly. Zuckerman considers him a dog interested only in destroying a great man’s success to start his own career. The similarities drawn between Zuckerman and Lonoff make clear the personal implications for him. He considers this a moral battle of sorts, one that riles him up as much as his feelings for Jamie.
 
Through both of these dramas, Zuckerman resembles a force-tranquilized, caged animal rebelling against his keepers. Everything must be done with consideration: conversations must be logged to be remembered, Kliman’s tormenting youth constantly must be abated and Jamie’s addictive presence is as much a source of frustration as of life. Death and life taunt the anachronistic man. After 11 years of singular isolation, he has returned to a world not his own --- this is not his New York, these are not his intellectuals (their intense despairing about Bush’s re-election is hilariously overwrought to us and alien to him).

Philip Roth sympathetically sculpts Zuckerman’s looming sense of fear of the world trying to pick him apart and his commitment to remaining in it, despite the ease with which he could return to his cabin. And yet Roth does this without maudlin heavy-handedness: EXIT GHOST has no pretensions --- its honesty is one of its greatest strengths. Zuckerman’s conflicted inner world is a profound portrait of a dying man.
 
Roth gives no easy answers to what it feels like to have the stuff of one’s self melt away. But we see the experience easily enough through Zuckerman. Death, it appears, provokes global reactions: one does not merely confront it in one’s mind --- it feels as if the whole world is pressing down, slicing away liberties and confining everything to a small cage. In Zuckerman’s journey we see few “universal life lessons” or other such cheap tricks; Roth does not stoop to that banal level. Instead, we are given insight into a man who shows us why an injured, still-proud predator refuses to close its eyes and die.

   --- Reviewed by Max Falkowitz

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