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The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s; a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his literary idol, E. I. Lonoff.
At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution. If she were, it might change his life...
The first volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound, The Ghost Writer is about the tensions between literature and life, artistic truthfulness and conventional decency - and about those implacable practitioners who live with the consequences of sacrificing one for the other.
(20040922)
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Though Zuckerman is full of hopes for a broader relationship with Lonoff, he soon discovers that his idol is a petulant and insecure man who has used and, in some cases, emotionally abused, those around him, all in the name of "art." Spending a sleepless winter night on the couch in Lonoff's den, Zuckerman investigates Lonoff's library, especially the collection of the writings of Henry James, which Lonoff admires so much, tries to write a letter to his estranged father (who is appalled by one of Nathan's recent short stories, which, he feels, feeds anti-Semitic prejudice), and ponders the relationship between genuine creativity, editing and revision, and the possible responsibilities of a writer beyond his own creative impulse.
A story about the writing of stories, this novella explores the fictional lives writers create from their own lives, and the sacrifices they make. As Lonoff's wife says of Lonoff, "Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of." Lonoff himself says, "I turn sentences around...That's my life." And Henry James says in a motto Lonoff has framed in his den, "We give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and passion is our task." When Zuckerman leaves Lonoff's house the next morning, he no longer sees Lonoff as an idol, but Zuckerman is still committed to his destiny as a writer, anxious to go to a writers' retreat to work on some new stories. Thoughtful, imaginative, and great fun to read, The Ghost Writer is one of Roth's most tightly organized and revelatory works, essential reading for anyone interested in the creative process. Mary Whipple
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