The Rake's Progress Giving Up The Ghost

In Philip Roth's new novel, "Exit Ghost," a neighbor of his longtime protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman—that Rothlike novelist—asks the questions all writers learn to dread. "Where do you get your ideas?" "How do you know if an idea is a good idea or a bad idea?" "How do you know when a book is finished?" "I heard a writer on television say that the characters take over the book and write it themselves. Is that true?" Naturally, these are just the questions you'd want to ask Roth himself when you sit with him in his agent's office: they boil down to What's it like in there? But luckily, he forgot to put the kibosh on this one: What are you reading these days? Roth is too polite to sigh. "I haven't been reading anybody contemporary," he says. "For the last several years, I've been rereading writers whom I haven't read since college or graduate school. I read quite a lot of Conrad last summer, and Turgenev. And the summer before that, I read a lot of Hemingway. What I'm doing is bidding adieu to the great writers."

Sooner or later, every reader begins to sense it's getting time for a last go-round with the masters. And judging by "Exit Ghost" and last year's "Everyman"—in which a nameless man in relentless decline finally dies under the knife—bidding adieu has become Roth's new fixation. Paradoxically, it's given his work yet another shot of energy. In the new novel, he bids adieu to Zuckerman himself, his fictive alter ego off and on since "The Ghost Writer" in 1979. By the way, Roth, 74, looks healthy, and is already working on a new book; he lets slip only that it has a butcher shop and a cat.

A dozen years ago, Philip Roth already had a comfortable place in America's postwar pantheon, alongside the likes of Updike, Mailer, Styron and the boys. Even his first book, the 1959 "Goodbye, Columbus," had become canonical. He'd had a scandalous best seller in "Portnoy's Complaint" (1969), whose narrator claims to be "the only person ever to ejaculate into the pocket of a baseball mitt at the Empire Burlesque house in Newark. Maybe." He'd completed the Zuckerman trilogy—"The Ghost Writer," "Zuckerman Unbound" and "The Anatomy Lesson," with its epilogue "The Prague Orgy"—newly republished by the Library of America. He'd written political satire (the Nixon-era "Our Gang"), Kafkaesque parable ("The Breast"), a baseball novel ("The Great American Novel") and much, much more. Another writer might have called it a career and settled into an endowed chair.

But since 1995, Roth has been producing a series of passionate, cantankerous, tragicomic novels—beginning with "Sabbath's Theater" and continuing through "American Pastoral," "The Human Stain" and "Everyman"—that have made him again a formidable contemporary, whose admirers include both the baldheaded and the shaven-headed. He remains a storyteller so addictive that you finish one book and reach for another. Who else has his range and depth in matters sexual, intellectual, psychological, emotional and political? And who else could play them all for laughs and still touch the heart? Bellow and Morrison have their Nobel Prizes. (So far Roth just has a Pulitzer, two National Book Awards, three PEN/Faulkners and various other awards and medals.) Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy have their partisans. But at this point, Roth is everybody's daddy.

Zuckerman, who in 1984's "The Anatomy Lesson" managed to get four different women on top of him as he lay on the floor with a bad back, has been both impotent and incontinent ever since the prostatectomy he announced in 1997's "American Pastoral." "I felt that I'd never really resolved this business of the prostatectomy and its consequences," Roth says. "And it seemed to me I should." In "Exit Ghost," Zuckerman learns of a collagen treatment that might give him "somewhat more control over my urine flow than an infant," and comes to New York after 11 years of solitary writing and rustication. The city stirs up the desires he'd suppressed—though he knows the collagen can't restore his potency. Even worse, his memory is now going: "If one morning I should pick up the page I had written the day before and find myself unable to remember writing it, what would I do? … Without my work, what would be left of me?" No wonder Roth can't imagine a further sequel: his business is with people in the world—even those about to leave it.

"Exit Ghost" is an ideal farewell—not that Zuckerman will fare well. He's lost his manhood, his control over body and mind, and the energy and aggression that once made him a literary warrior. When he confronts a young scholar—"I'm going to do everything I can to sabotage you"—he sounds like poor old Lear, railing against the daughters who've become his keepers: "I will do such things— / What they are yet I know not—but they shall be / The terrors of the earth." But is Roth sure this is Zuckerman's last go-round? "Pretty certain," he says. "Pretty certain. I mean, I arranged it that way. I meant the conclusion to be very conclusive. And I can't imagine reopening it." Does he miss Zuckerman? "No, I don't," he says. "I get more satisfaction out of seeing the thing brought to a close. I think it's the right ending."

Roth's detractors won't like "Exit Ghost" any better than his other books. Early in his career, Jewish groups called him on the carpet for defamation. ("So I thought finally, 'Well, you want it, I'll give it to you'," he said in a 1984 interview. "And out came Portnoy, apertures spurting.") After "Portnoy," he was a self-hating Jew and a pornographer, then a misogynist, then simply a bastard: the constant in these critiques is a failure to distinguish between the work and the man. Carlin Romano, writing in The Philadelphia Inquirer, begins his review of "Exit Ghost" by harking back to actress Claire Bloom's 1996 memoir of life with Roth, whom she portrays as a monster. "Bloom … remains the only person close to Roth who has defied, in print, his fierce attempts to control information about his private life," Romano writes. "She makes the point repeatedly … that while Roth reflexively savages critics … for ineptly reading his books as if they're more autobiographical than imaginative, those critics are often right … A Roth novel is evidence of the mind behind it, and observing Philip Roth's angry, self-indulgent mind gets sadder by the year." This may be Romano's inadvertent audition for a part in Roth's next book.

Before being interviewed for this story, Roth put his private life off-limits—leaving whatever ferocity to the publicist—and it's hard to see what such a discussion could have added. Since his fiction is the only reason people gossip about Roth in the first place, why does it matter what proportions of invention and recollection go into it? In any novel, even "truth" is fiction. Zuckerman is unarguably "angry and self-indulgent"—you know, unlike the rest of us—yet nobody minds those traits in King Lear. He's also desperate, sad, funny as hell, both a phallic imperialist and a fool about the women. None of this would be news to Roth, the novelist who took pains to make him so.

In "Exit Ghost," Roth beats this still-not-dead horse one more time. Amy Bellette, the ingénue of "The Ghost Writer," who's now an old woman with a brain tumor, writes an unpublished letter to The New York Times: "Your cultural journalism is tabloid gossip … What transgression has the writer committed, and not against the exigencies of literary esthetics, but against his or her daughter, son, mother, father, spouse, lover, friend, publisher or pet?" Though she doesn't say it, Amy is thinking of her only love, the neglected writer E. I. Lonoff, Zuckerman's hero. (Who's no more Bernard Malamud than Roth is Zuckerman.) When Lonoff died, he was working on a novel involving brother-sister incest; now the young scholar whom Zuckerman threatens has got hold of the manuscript and means to write a biography treating the incest as the crucial incident in Lonoff's life. The biography would revive interest in Lonoff's work—while trivializing it as mere coded confession.

What does Roth himself imagine is the "truth" about this fictive issue? Or does he care? "I should, shouldn't I?" He laughs. "I should care. The other night, I reread a little section where Zuckerman is trying to persuade Amy that Lonoff stole the incest theme from a biography of Hawthorne. And I thought, 'Did he?' Zuckerman makes this theory up, but Amy says Lonoff did commit incest with his sister. And Amy should know. But Amy's been brain-damaged. I don't know what the truth is. I think what's important is that the ambiguity is clear."

Roth doesn't mind a touch of the inexplicable. In "Exit Ghost," a pair of kittens in the Berkshires reappear as cats in Manhattan, with a completely different owner. "I just thought, 'Do it.' Why? I'm not responsible for that." Similarly, he acted on an impulse to drop in a long eulogy for George Plimpton, and an account of the funeral. "I like to introduce something new about two thirds of the way through a book," he says. "Not just tying the threads together, but something brand new. It's a challenge. You just go out there and do it." And, as many writers do after the fact, he's belatedly discovering what he actually did. At what point did he see that the two important women in the novel, Amy and the "delighting" young writer Jamie Logan—the object of Zuckerman's dead-end desire—have usefully assonant names? This makes him laugh, too. "About a week ago."

It's not that Roth tosses his books off—he simply knows when to let intuition light up the drudgery. He still keeps factory-worker hours, and retains the curiosity of a cub reporter. For the glove factory in "American Pastoral," he found an old-timer in Gloversville, N.Y., who cut a glove for him, then made him cut one. ("You know, I lost them. I wore them in the country, to carry wood for the fireplace. I shouldn't have, but they fit so badly. They're probably there by the wood bin.") For "Everyman," he interviewed a Dominican jeweler on Broadway and called another jeweler in Chicago. For "I Married a Communist," he visited a zinc mine. And "Exit Ghost" is conspicuously knowledgeable about the luggage business and upper-crust life in Houston. "It's the best part of the writing," Roth says. "Especially after 'American Pastoral,' I just found that going out and learning something was the greatest pleasure. And I would often say, 'Why the hell didn't I go into the glove business? I'd be so much happier'."

Certainly his hero hasn't had much fun. In "Exit Ghost," Zuckerman thinks he has one more book in him, to be called "He and She." (He'd considered "A Man in Diapers.") His preliminary notes—imagined dialogues between him and Jamie, in which he can't even fantasize cutting the mustard—make the heart sink, but doesn't his indomitability, such as it is, count for something? Similarly, at the end of "Everyman," doesn't the hero's final, glorious memory balance out, if only esthetically, the death that's shortly to come? Are these books as grim and terminal as they seem? "I think your words 'grim' and 'terminal' are correct," Roth says. "There's energy in the telling, there's energy in the depicting, but—for instance, in 'Everyman' I did bring back that scene of him being a kid at the beach. There's a strong presence of the sea in his memory, but he's still dying. He's still dying. I think the death strongly outweighs the final life-loving vision. I suppose you're reminded of the sensuous high point of his life. And in 'Exit Ghost,' of course, Zuckerman still won't let go, he's still sexual prey at the very end, he's still under a sexual enchantment, and he still has the wherewithal to imagine, so—you pays your money and you takes your choice."

Zuckerman begins his last story by evoking his 11-year self-exile with his trees and his typewriter. "I had ceased to inhabit not just the great world, but the present moment." There's one way you can tell him from Philip Roth, who greets you with a wisecrack about Larry Craig, who writes on the computer like the rest of us and whose fiction has engaged 48 years of present moments. But in "Exit Ghost," Zuckerman feels like a "revenant" while walking the streets of present-day Manhattan, and he's not the only shade around. Amy Bellette, herself soon to die, believes that the ghost of Lonoff dictated her letter to the Times. "Reading/writing people," Lonoff told her, "we are finished, we are ghosts witnessing the end of the literary era. Take this down." And in Amy's apartment, Zuckerman sees Lonoff's old easy chair, and recalls the slightly more optimistic ghost in T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding," who tells the poet: "Last year's words belong to last year's language / And next year's words await another voice."

It's what every aging writer feels: whether the torch gets passed or the past gets torched, you won't be around. Zuckerman's gone, but Roth is still with us; on the other hand, Zuckerman will still be with us when Roth is gone. As the dying Lonoff said, bidding adieu to Amy: "The end is so immense, it is its own poetry. It requires little rhetoric. Just state it plainly." In "Exit Ghost," as in "Everyman," Roth has made a masterpiece by following this injunction. So smart of him to make it up.

Roth first wrote about a Nathan Zuckerman in "My Life as a Man" (1974). Back then he was a novelist invented by another invented novelist, David Tarnapol. Then he got real.

'The Ghost Writer' (1979)
Young Z visits his literary hero, falls for the man's mistress. Is she the grown-up Anne Frank?

'Zuckerman Unbound' (1981)
Z, now famous for a randy best seller, finds himself besieged by strangers—and a stalker. At least he gets to bed an actress.

'The Anatomy Lesson' (1984)
Now Z's the one who's flat on his back, though not alone. His orthopedic problems symptomize a dislocated soul. And he can't write anymore.

'The Prague Orgy' (1985)
Z gets outta Dodge—to communist Prague, in search of a trove of great, unpublished Yiddish stories. A writer's life is really no fun there.

'The Counterlife' (1987)
Z's brother Henry dies, but Z brings him fictionally back to life and sends him to Israel. H finds more adventure than he did back in his dental office.

'American Pastoral' (1997)
Now impotent after prostate surgery, Z re-creates the life of an old schoolmate, once the athlete-hero of Newark, whose daughter became a bomb-making radical.

'I Married a Communist' (1998)
Z gets the real story of another old hero: a leftwing actor not only blacklisted, but the subject of an exposé by his ex-wife.

'The Human Stain' (2000)
Z acquires another confidant: an academic undone by the P.C. police, and hiding a town-gown affair. That's not his biggest secret.

'Exit Ghost' (2007)
The end of the road. Z comes out of rural retreat and finds he's no match for New York, or anything else.