Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

There’s a coffee house a block from the church. I walk there a couple of times a week for a cup of coffee. Just inside the front door there’s a book bin where folks can drop off books they don’t want, or help themselves for free to someone else’s discards. I’ve done both myself. (One of my favorite lucky finds was Chasing Lost Time, the biography of the translator of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.) Recently, I picked up four books, which was a pleasant haul: What Makes Sammy Run, by Budd Schulberg; a little book of philosophy; a paperback mystery by Donna Leon called Death at La Fenice, which I thought would be fun to read before I spend a week in Venice in July, and this novel by Philip Roth, Exit Ghost.

I’ve read quite a lot of Philip Roth, and he’s written quite a lot so there are more novels than I’ve read. The Human Stain and Operation Shylock are two of my favorites. I read Sabbath’s Theater, The Plot Against America and The Counterlife. As a teenager I read Portnoy’s Complaint and two other early novels shortly after they came out: Goodbye, Columbus and The Ghost Writer.

The Ghost Writer was Roth’s first novel to feature his character Nathan Zuckerman, who is a sort of stand-in for Roth himself and appears in nine of his novels total, including The Counterlife and The Human Stain. Exit Ghost is the last of Roth’s Zuckerman books, published in 2007. He wrote four more short novels after this one. Roth died in 2018.

In Exit Ghost, Nathan Zuckerman is 71. Surgery for prostate cancer has left him impotent and incontinent. He lives alone, a secluded writer’s life in the New England, but the novel takes place in New York City, where Zuckerman has returned after an eleven year absence in order to pursue a second surgical procedure that might cure his incontinence. He stays at a Hilton in mid-town. He compares himself to Rip Van Winkle, disconnected from people and politics and cell phones. The year is 2004 and the entire action takes place in the week surrounding the election where George W. Bush defeats John Kerry to win a second term.

Leaving the hospital after the procedure, Zuckerman recognizes a woman at the hospital, a patient with the loss of hair and scars on her skull indicating a brain tumor. This is Amy Bellette, whom Zuckerman met once 48 years earlier. Their earlier meeting is the subject of the first Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer. As a young woman, Amy Bellette had been the student and then the lover of a writer of short stories named E. I. Lonoff that Zuckerman admired. Zuckerman and Amy Bellette had together been guests at the home of Lonoff and his wife, Hope, on the weekend that saw the break-up of their marriage. That weekend, and Zuckerman’s fantasy that Amy Bellette is actually Anne Frank, survived the war and starting life over in New England, is the plot of The Ghost Writer. In Exit Ghost we learn that Lonoff died 40 years earlier never having published a novel that he was supposedly writing during the five years he lived with Amy Bellette. Hope is still alive but suffering from Alzheimers.

Zuckerman has dinner alone and reads in a newspaper a notice that a young couple in New York are looking for a house swap. The couple are both writers and are looking for a retreat that sounds exactly like Nathan Zuckerman’s secluded house. On a whim he calls the couple and meets them. Coincidences abound. It turns out the woman of the couple, Jamie, is a woman Zuckerman met briefly when he gave a reading at the college she attended. He’s immediately attracted to her. His hopes of having further reasons to be near her convinces him to pursue the idea of swapping houses. Further coincidence, Jamie has a friend, and possible lover named Richard Kliman, who is working on a biography of E. I. Lonoff.

Without asking permission, Jamie puts Kliman in touch with Zuckerman and Kliman calls Zuckerman hoping to interview him for the book. When they meet, Kliman tells Zuckerman that Lonoff finished the novel but never published it because the novel, unlike Lonoff’s previous short fiction, was autobiographical and revealed that Lonoff as a teenager had for several years an incestuous affair with his slightly older half sister. Zuckerman determines to thwart Kliman’s plan, if possible, disgusted by the idea of selling a biography on the theory of a scandal, and tainting the reputation of a writer he admires. He’s also jealous of Kliman’s youth and health. And he’s jealous that Kliman was, and may still be Jamie’s lover.

Zuckerman suffers from the humiliations of age. Zuckerman’s treatment, the reason he came to New York, fails to help. He’s sexually attracted to Jamie but unable to do anything about it. His incontinence forces him to wear an absorbent pad in his pants and change it regularly. His memory is failing. He keep notes of his activities but frets that he is missing important details. He dreads the day when he will no longer be able to write because he won’t be able to keep track of a story. He mentions a novel he recently finished and sent to a loyal first reader and the reader returned it saying kindly that it wasn’t publishable, or even fixable.

Zuckerman feels out of his time. He despairs of a future for literature. He’s disconnected from and disappointed in the modern world. That the novel is set during election week allows the liberal characters to moan about the catastrophe of Bush’s re-election and what it says about the collapse of American moral values. Little do they know what’s coming!

Zuckerman meets with Kliman, and Jamie, and eventually with Amy Bellette, where he learns that she had given Kliman the first half of the manuscript from the novel. Brilliantly, Zuckerman reveals that the “great secret” of Lonoff’s supposed incest sounds an awful lot like a probably specious story told about Nathaniel Hawthorne and an affair with his sister, a story that Lonoff must have known and may have borrowed for his plot.

Throughout the novel, Zuckerman returns to his hotel room and types up his memories and fantasies of his meetings with Jamie as a play in dialogue titled “He and She”. In the five long chapters that make up this shortish book of 292 pages, there are two “He and She” sections in Chapter Two. All of Chapter Four is a “He and She” dialog. In Chapter Five there are two more dialog sections, in the first of these, the “He” is Richard Kliman instead of Zuckerman. The final “He and She” fantasy, which ends the book, has Zuckerman inviting Jamie over to his hotel room and she agrees, but he breaks off the dialog and the fantasy abruptly, throws his things into a bag and leaves back for his secluded home in New England. Exit Ghost.

Many of Roth’s usual concerns are here again. His male character’s sexual appetite. The position of Jews in the world and in America. The literary world. I like his writing. His plots are both elevated in their concerns but also delicious in their complexities and twists. The characters seem real and though their concerns and milieu are seldom mine, always interesting. Having stumbled upon another Roth to read after many years, I look forward to reading more.