Exit Ghost [Hardcover]

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.

There's a story here but, by Roth's recent standards, it makes for a thin novel.
The hook for Roth's commentary about the problems of ageing for his single, male alter ego Nathan Zuckerman, is Zuckerman's first visit to New York after eleven years living in solitude in his remote cabin in the Berkshires. The purpose of his visit is to attend a clinic in an attempt to cure his incontinence. This is the first of the ageing issues Zuckerman brings to our attention and he spends a good few early pages giving us a full and frank insight into it.
Whilst in New York, Zuckerman responds to an advertisment seeking a one-year property exchange, 9/11 is still recent history and someone is looking to swap their worried-by-the-threat-of-terrorism lifestyle in a New York appartment for the security of a remote, the-terrorists-will-never-find-this-place location where they can re-establish a degree of calm existence.

That's the top-level. Below that, Zuckerman starts experiencing more ageing male issues as he thinks his sexual desire is being rekindled by the female half of the New York appartment couple. Finally, intertwined with that, is the appearance of a budding writer, Richard Kliman, who wants to produce a tell-all biography of Zuckerman's literary hero, E. I. Lonoff and is seeking help from one of the few people alive who knew him, namely, Zuckerman.

In fact it was Kliman's first appearance when the novel perked up and looked as though it might be going somewhere and, throughout, it is Kliman's effect, whether directly on Zuckerman or indirectly through the other characters, that keeps the story alive. Overall, whilst the other characters are skillfully developed and Zuckerman's anger and frustrations both with Kliman, whose biographic intentions he vehemently opposes, and with his own circumstances are expertly portrayed, I never felt any sympathy for, or much interest in Zuckerman's plight and, after a while, I just wanted him to make up his mind about appartment or back-to-the-Berkshires existence, get on with the rest of his life and leave me to look forward to get on with mine.