Goodbye, Nathan

Could Philip Roth’s last Zuckerman novel be in danger of being over-read?

Exit Ghost,
Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin, $26

IT IS NOT SO CLEAR how we should read this new book by Philip Roth, the best novelist writing in English today and by every indication a novelist inhabiting an extended period of extraordinary brilliance. Perhaps it is the drama of the moment. Exit Ghost is the last Nathan Zuckerman novel. In his return to the hectic life after long years as a recluse, in his negotiation of the processes of aging and dying, and in his brushes with people and thoughts from the past, Roth skilfully sets up a series of parallels. And even after reading the last page of this novel, suspicion remains. Yes, Roth is doing much more than just have Zuckerman exit, but at which point could we be in danger of over-reading?

The simple truth is, Roth can never be over-read. So, in Exit Ghost, as his sentences get sparer than they used to be, we are being invited to consider not just the Zuckerman shelf, but all of Roth’s novels.

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In title and in the architecture of the novel, Exit Ghost bookends a shelf that began with The Ghost Writer, the first Zuckerman book. Then, Zuckerman had come to the Berkshires to bow to and gain inspiration from E.I. Lonoff. There he had met young Amy Bellette, and wondered about her relationship with the great writer.

Now, himself a recluse, Zuckerman returns to New York City after 11 years for prostate surgery. It’s election year, 2004, not that Zuckerman initially knows the politics of it, having shut out news of the outside world for so long. A fleeting sight of Amy, herself undergoing treatment for cancer, somehow compels him to answer a classified by a New York couple seeking a house swap for a year in the countryside. The thirtysomething couple are also aspiring writers. Zuckerman, predictably, finds himself drawn to the young woman.

He also meets Richard Kliman, who is working on a biography of Lonoff. Zuckerman is outraged that Kliman is working backwards from Lonoff’s fiction to fill in the blanks in the writer’s life. The outrage produces lovely sentences on writing and on fiction. But other than that Kliman appears to be a device to keep the narrative taut.

For Roth’s readers, Exit Ghost is, then, a sum of so many things. It is the closing novel in the Zuckerman series, a series that contains Roth’s best works. Stop a moment and consider the largeheartedness of the move. When a writer of fiction bids goodbye to a character who has kept moving his best novels, it is a compact with the reader. Roth is heeding the reader’s need for closure, and setting himself the challenge of finding other ways to keep his fiction moving.

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Exit Ghost, as Roth has indicated in interviews, also makes something of a quartet with his American Trilogy: Roth is already inquiring into the legacy of the Bush years. Exit Ghost is also in some ways a companion to Everyman, his previous (non-Zuckerman) novel on dying and contemplating the meaning of a single lived life.

For those of us sad to see Zuckerman go, however, Exit Ghost demands a quieter reread after a gap of a few months. To see how — indeed, whether — it could be read as a stand-alone novel.