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Until
the Bitter End
By
John Dicker
Exit
Ghost
By
Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin, 304 pages, $26
Philip
Roth’s last novel Everyman chronicled a man’s descent
into death after a life that taught him very little about
his nature. His new novel Exit Ghost is far sunnier:
It’s about another man’s descent into a state in which everything
he knows about his limitations is painfully reconfirmed through
a spate of poor judgment.
Imagine if, at age 70, male human beings were compelled to
relearn developmental lessons like “hot means hot.” An entire
generation puts their finger to the frying pan even though
they know what they’ll get. That’s the rough equivalent of
Exit Ghost, the last great hurrah of Roth’s famous
alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. It’s actually a bit more enjoyable,
for Roth observers at least, than this glib characterization,
but it certainly begs the question . . .
Can we please get this otherwise amazing novelist off his
death trip? Yes, dark explorations yield profound insights
and they’re arguably inevitable for any serious artist. So
let me clarify: Philip Roth, winner of the Pulitzer, three
Penn Faulkners and enough lesser prizes to stock a dozen Chinese
container ships, and the only living novelist to have his
work collected by the American Library, has produced some
of his finest work in the last decade. From the complicated
prison of race, class and political correctness in The
Human Stain to the history as imagined horror of The
Plot Against America, Roth’s last half dozen novels have,
in this the mid- September of his years, become more pointed,
but without losing any of the delightful hostility of his
earlier days. But lately he seems content to pick at the scabs
of his mortality.
The short of Exit Ghost is this: Nathan Zuckerman,
having forsworn the life of a famous writer—teaching classes,
giving interviews, having relationships—accidentally emerges
from his decade of self exile in western Massachusetts. In
part because of a series of threatening letters from an anonymous
anti-Semite Zuckerman sought safety in the countryside during
the 1990s. More than that, he aimed to wipe out all distractions
from his work. He succeeds. Minimal social calls, no wife,
no kids—just work.
Of course, because this is a novel our protagonist gives it
one more go. You see, Zuckerman may be a man of letters but
he’s now a man of diapers as well. Left incontinent and impotent
by prostate surgery, he returns to Manhattan to see an urologist
who, he’s assured, can restore him to his previous state.
So intoxicating is this specter of hope that it opens up the
door to all sorts of abandoned yearnings. Like an affair with
a beautiful, decidedly unavailable (and inappropriately aged)
woman. A significant portion of the novel is written in the
form of a play, imagined dialogue between Zuckerman and Jamie,
the 30-year-old woman whose Upper West Side apartment he contemplates
swapping for his Massachusetts home for one year. While the
seduction is intriguing and perhaps even erotic, it quickly
descends into somewhat intellectual masturbation as Zuckerman
(and Roth, and the reader) know it cannot, and will not go
anywhere beyond tortured longing.
The most pleasurable moments in Exit Ghost are the
ancillary riffs. So alluring is Roth’s pitch for Zuckerman’s
willful retreat into political ignorance it could function
as some sort of Club Med for today’s weary dissidents. Witness:
The despising without remission that constitutes being a conscientious
citizen in the reign of George W. Bush was not for one who
had developed a strong interest in surviving as reasonably
serene—and so I began to annihilate the abiding wish to
find out. I canceled magazine subscriptions, stopped reading
The Times, even stopped picking up the occasional copy
of the Boston Globe when I went down to the general
store
Ultimately, Zuckerman proves incapable of living out his days
as an anchorite of letters. It’s just that when a string of
opportunities pop up in rapid succession, he can’t resist.
He knows too well that his foray into the world he left behind
is doomed to failure and so it fails. Prostate be damned,
he beats a path back to the Berkshires and the artificial
barriers he erected eleven years ago.
Zuckerman was once Roth’s sounding board for entertaining,
if indulgent, ideas about a writer and his work. The character
proved much more useful as a sounding board, a narrative conduit
for the likes of characters like Coleman Silk in The Human
Stain or Swede Levov in American Pastoral. So it’s
sad to bid the alter ego farewell, but it’s good riddance
to his graying anxiety. Zuckerman, and Roth, are at their
best when looking backward. Both of their futures are too
preoccupied with crafting eulogies to manhood lost. That is
until Pfizer comes up with Viagra of the soul.
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