Exit Ghost [Paperback]

First of all let me say that you shouldn't read this novel until you have read The Ghost Writer. In The Ghost Writer, the first novel to feature Nathan Zuckerman, the young writer travelled from New York to the Berkshires to visit his hero E.I.Lonoff. In Exit Ghost, which is probably the final appearance of Roth's alter ego, the journey is reversed and after 11 years in rural exile Zuckerman returns to the city, 'where the biggest thing of all occurred', on the eve of the presidential election which, we know, will put Bush back in the White House.

I had banished my country, been myself banished from erotic contact with women, and was lost through battle fatigue to the world of love.

He has made the journey, impotent and incontinent after prostate surgery, to undergo a procedure that he hopes will return to him some control over his bladder. It is the latest in the series of mortifications which we have endured with Zuckerman and another stripping away of the vitality and virility which has been such a huge part of him. Face to face with modern life again he surprises himself by responding to a house-swap advert from a young writerly couple looking for solitude, allowing his return to the city. But confronted with ghosts from his past his attempt to re-engage with the world is doomed to be a futile gesture.

Along with the surprise of making impulsive decisions comes the surprising reawakening of his sexual self. Jamie the young female writer exerts 'a huge gravitational pull on the ghost of my desire' but where the mind is willing the body is unable 'I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again'. But the problem here is that the mind isn't even that willing anymore. Zuckerman's encounters with Jamie come in the form of imagined dialogues which lack character, insight and any real teeth at all.

He also encounters the woman who played such a thrilling part in the first novel, Amy Bellette, whom Zuckerman re imagined as an Anne Frank who had survived her fate. Now at the age of 75 she is transformed into a crazy looking woman in customised hospital gown with head half shaved and an ugly scaracross her scalp, a horrific transformation from the woman who had so charged the young Zuckerman's creativity. Having survived her lover Lonoff she is being hounded (as will Zuckerman) by Kliman, a young writer who wishes to write a biography of Lonoff containing the 'big secret' he had kept from everyone. Zuckerman's battles with this arrogant, pushy reminder of his own youth are the closest we get to fireworks. 'You're dying old man you'll soon be dead! You smell of decay. You smell like death!' he shouts to a urine soakedZuckerman.

Roth writes very well about what it is like to be a man losing his potency, both physically and mentally but the problem with having such a debilitated hero is that the writing as a whole suffers. Reading the dialogues between Zuckerman and Jamie is like reading a bad play script. Towards the end of the novel there is a section eulogising George Plimpton which comes from nowhere and feels very out of place. Roth is still better than most writers even when not on top form but there isn't much fun to be had reading a writer writing about how hard it has become to write.

Roth has written much better work (I really recommend The Counterlife and American Pastoral) and whilst those who are already fans will find much to admire it seems unlikely that Exit Ghost will convert any doubters.

It's becoming cliché to talk of Philip Roth's "late flowering". Between his 62nd and 73rd years, he reeled off Sabbath's Theater (1995), American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), The Human Stain (2000), The Dying Animal (2001), The Plot Against America (2004) and Everyman (2006) -- an oeuvre so rich, so memorable and so filmable that most novelists would happily call it a lifetime's work. For Roth it took eleven years. But Exit Ghost (2007) breaks the sequence -- it's his worst piece of fiction in a long time.

We join long-suffering Roth alterego Nathan Zuckerman in a nervy post-9/11 New York. Aging fast and disconnected from the world, he indulges in a house swap with a couple of trendy creatives so as to reimmerse himself in the "Here and Now".

Surprisingly, knowledge of The Ghost Writer (1979), a novel published 30-odd years ago, is assumed. If you don't know your E.I. Lonoff from your elbow, frustration will quickly ensue. This, then, is one for aficionados. But even allowing that Exit Ghost is an epilogue rather than a novel, it's tepid stuff. Zuckerman, ultimately, has become an average old bloke with an average old bloke's concerns: incontinence, impotence, senility, nostalgia, younger women. The book -- though composed (of course) in witty, tight, marvellous prose -- never rises above the mildly diverting. Perhaps for Roth, as for Zuckerman, Autumn is finally here.

Exit Ghost was published a year or so ago, but I've been putting off reading it, while also knowing that it was inevitable that sooner or later I would find myself once again in the company of Nathan Zuckerman, the "hero" of Roths's excellent "The Human Stain".

There is much more to this book that I have written below but I am always conscious of the need not to spoil the book for other readers. The outline of the story below is little more than can be found on the inside of the jacket.

In Exit Ghost, we find Zuckerman aged 70+, and returning to New York to receive treatment for incontinence. We read that he had exiled himself to a small house by a marsh for the last eleven years, and had cut himself off not only physically from his old life, but also going to the extent of cancelling his subcriptions to magazines and newspapers and only listening to the radio for its music.

In New York, the elderly author finds himself immediately sucked into the life of the city, reliving conflicts, relationships and literary controversies that were so much a part of his working life years before. This novel is primarily about aging, and Philip Roth from time to time quotes T S Eliots Little Gidding:

Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
. . . the bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.

For while Zuckerman's mind and desires still seem to draw him back into his earlier life and activities, his body and brain sadly let him down at every stage, leaving only the "conscious impotence of rage at human folly", not least his own.

In fact, everything has crumbled. Zuckerman gets drawn into the possibility of a house exchange with a young couple who want to get away from the city for a year or so. He becomes sexually obsessed with the young woman, despite her obvious happiness with her husband, and his own post-prostate impotence and incontinence. He returns to his hotel after meeting her and writes down the imaginary conversations he would have had with her had his powers not deserted him, revealing that something of youthful desire lives on long after the physical capabilites of fulfilling them have long-since disappeared.

He is approached by the young biographer of a long-dead author who in Zuckerman's youth was his mentor, and finds himself outraged that the young writer is doing the usual digging around for human interest and hints of scandal rather than restricting himself to the literary development of Zuckerman's mentor. Zuckerman fails to see that what he loathes about the biographer Klinsman are precisely the traits which he himself carried in years gone by. The virility and agressiveness of Klinsman seems to bring out a passionate hatred and anger in Zuckerman which can only come from a man who is desparately rejecting the decay he is himself experiencing.

Exit Ghost is not a happy book. Zuckerman looks in as though through a cloudy window on a vibrant world of people forging their careers and reputations, one which gave him so much delight in his earlier years but one from which he is himself excluded. He seems unable to receive the consolation of later years when one is content to reflect on the past and enjoy the different pleasures which come from freedom from the constant striving which ambition brings.

Zuckerman is an immensely sad figure, adapted to his lonliness and isolation, but always aware that the smallest re-engagement with current literary life can start him off again, raging and arguing, fulfilling his craving for the admiration of men and the attentions of women. Complete withdrawal seems to be the only answer, but not a withdrawal to a comfortable life of peaceful satisfaction, but a sort of angry silence where the demons are held at bay only by constant self-denial of the things that provoke them.

A brilliant book of course, painful, difficult at times, even agonising, but it would be a terrible shame to miss it.