Exit Ghost

by Philip Roth

Hardcover, 2007

Status

Available

Series

Zuckerman Bound (9)

Tags

fiction

Genres

Description

Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age. Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jaime, whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body. The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman's youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman's first literary hero, E.I. Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman depleted by illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere American writer who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing vocation. The third connection is with Lonoff's would-be biographer, a young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff's "great secret". Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities. Haunted by Roth's earlier works - the melancholy comedy of The Ghost Writer, the counterpoint of the imaginary and the real in The Counterlife, the distinctive dialogues of Deception - Exit Ghost is a reminder of Roth's incomparable style and themes and an amazing leap into yet another phase in this great writer's insatiable commitment to fiction.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member msbaba
Exit Ghost is the second Philip Roth book that I’ve read. I read the first, Everyman, a few months ago, and it convinced me that I’d been foolishly wrongheaded about not reading Roth earlier in my life. I had falsely believed that his male-centered themes and characters might hold no interest
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 for me, a woman who came of age during the 1970s feminist movement. But my experience with these two books has taught me otherwise. Roth is every bit the national literary treasure that others proclaim, and he can be read with pleasure by even died-in-the-wool aging feminists, like me. Personally, I might not like the main male characters in his books, but Roth takes me deep into their souls and I emerge with a better understanding of the human condition.

Exit Ghost is complete in itself. I enjoyed it thoroughly and did not feel confused as if I needed to know some prior information about the character to understand what was happening from another book in the series. But now, that I’ve read the plot summary of the first book in the series, I am intellectually curious to find out all the hidden parallels that escaped me.

The novel entertained me with its story, but I can’t imagine anyone reading Roth purely for the story line. It seems obvious that Roth is read foremost to experience his skill as a writer, and second to hear what this man has to say about major issues of our time. Roth uses his works as a pulpit to preach about important issues that concern him.

In this novel, Roth analyzes the declining state of literature in the modern world and proclaims it dead. At one point, the main character, Nathan Zuckerman, rants: "the predominant uses to which literature is now put in the culture pages of the enlightened newspapers and in university English departments are so destructively at odds with the aims of imaginative writing, as well as with the rewards that literature affords to an open-minded reader, that it would be better if literature were no longer put to any public use."

In an interview with Roth about Exit Ghost published in The Independent (London, 10/3/07), he says: “Writers have always been extremely marginal to the cultural concerns of American citizens, but there was a moment when there were books that interested the general public that were written by some fine writers... Then the attention of readers has shifted away. They've been overcome by so many other distractions; and the habit of concentration I think has been badly damaged, by the nature of the cultural stimuli. So it feels to me very much like a dying moment, for literary culture in my own country—but you can't have computers and iPods and BlackBerries and blueberries and raspberries, and have time left to sit for two or three hours with a book.”

There is another important theme repeated throughout this work: don’t judge authors by the conduct of their lives, but rather on the content of their works. Envisioning his own life story in the hands of a future biographer, Zuckerman asks: "How will I have failed to be the model human being? My great, unseemly secret. Surely there was one. Surely there was more than one. An astonishing thing it is, too, that one's prowess and achievement, such as they have been, should find their consummation in the retribution of biographical inquisition. The man in control of the words, the man making up the stories all his life, winds up, after death, remembered, if at all, for a story made up about him, his covert brand of baseness discovered and described with uncompromising candor, clarity, self-certainty, with grave concern for the most delicate issues of morality, and with no small measure of delight."

This is a dark and angry book, full of fury and disgust for the failure of aging bodies, the marginalization of literature in the modern world, and a great deal of modern culture in general. It is powerful stuff. I recommend it highly.
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LibraryThing member mrstreme
In his latest installment of Nathan Zuckerman stories, Philip Roth created a story of an aging literary genius who was battling several demons: incontinence, impotence, a failing memory and worries about his legacy. This is my first Zuckerman book where he narrated (he did appear in The Human Stain
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 but more as a minor character), and I found his storytelling to be intelligent, desperate and enthralling.

Zuckerman lived in near-isolation in the Berkshires but traveled to his old stomping ground, New York City, for an experimental procedure to help with his incontinence (a result of prostate cancer). While there, he becomes intrigued by an ad where a young couple wanted to swap homes for a year. Jamie and Billy were looking for a country refuge to escape the scares of terrorism in post-09/11 New York City. On a whim, Zuckerman agreed to meet the couple and became mesmerized by the beguiling Jamie (frustrating for an impotent Zuckerman).

Through Jamie, an ambitious young writer, Richard Kliman, contacted Zuckerman. Kliman was writing a biography on a long-forgotten American author, E.I. Lonoff, (one of Zuckerman’s heroes). However, Kliman wanted to add a scandal to Lonoff’s story. Outraged, Zuckerman realized that he’s an old man – no match for the young energy produced by Kliman – and wondered: After Zuckerman died, who was to stop a young author from writing his biography full of scandal and secrets?

This story documented the journey of a genius, dealing with the physical limitations of an aging body and the slow mental decline of his brain. You felt Zuckerman’s desperation, frustration and determination to remain the man he once was. More than that, though, you shared Zuckerman’s concern for his legacy, literary canon and lack of control over both once he was gone.

I thought Exit Ghost was brilliant. Filled with witty prose, political satire and ageism, I look forward to reading Zuckerman’s stories set during his prime. You have to wonder if Zuckerman’s creator, Philip Roth, shared his character’s frustrations as an aging writer. If what I’ve read is any indication, Roth is secure in his legacy as one of American’s greatest writers.
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LibraryThing member TheAmpersand
I finally decided to pick up "Exit Ghost" after re-reading "Portnoy's Complaint" for the first time in perhaps fifteen years. Alexander Portnoy, and, really, Phillip Roth himself, is a ball of fire in that one, and while I haven't read all of the other Zuckerman books, I wondered how a personality
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 like Alexander Portnoy's might age. "Exit Ghost" does provide a few possible answers to that question. When we meet Nathan Zuckerman, he's more or less withdrawn from the world, from sexual life, and is living more or less as a hermit, relying entirely on his past to give his writing the sustenance it needs. Though the book is, unsurprisingly, full of self-laceration and self-doubt, Zuckerman has, at the very least, the self-knowledge to recognize more-or-less what he was and what he is becoming. An unexpected trip to New York and a couple of chance encounters rock Nathan's boat, sure, but this is hardly surprising: you can count on self-reflection to be the strong suit of most of Roth's characters.

As a book, "Exit Ghost" feels a lot like Roth on autopilot, which is still a pretty good thing. The sentences flow beautifully and the novel is generally well-constructed. Despite the fact that its main character "re-discovers" New York after having been away for about a decade, the book is largely inward-focused. Readers shouldn't turn here to find novel critiques on modern living, and the jabs that Roth aims at modern readers and critics who care more for a writer's biography than for his work feel well aimed, but also out of place in a book that's narrated by a character who's essentially a lightly fictionalized version of its author. In the end, the best reasons for reading "Exit Ghost," besides, of course, its prose, are its characters and its depiction of aging. Roth presents us with the story of two couples: Amy and Manny -- he was a perhaps great writer who was dropped from reading lists long ago, she was his student and his last romance -- and Jamie and Billy, two aspiring writers who are facing challenges that are both different from and similar to those that the younger Zuckerman once faced. While it's clear that Zuckerman's brain is failing him, he still manages, using his sharp eye and deep understanding of human motivation, to pay homage to each of these relationships, which seem both familiar and maddeningly unique, as are most relationships, if you observe them long enough. Each of these characters comes alive, inspiring, by turns, interest, sexual intrigue, affection and, particularly in the case of Amy, a deep sense of pathos. As for Roth's portrait of aging, it's pretty spare: Zuckerman omits all the usual aches and pains to describe only how age has robbed him of his bladder control, his sexual potency and, increasingly, his memory. But it's enough. The sense of loss imparted to the reader as a yet undiagnosed affliction robs him of his short-term memory seems very real indeed. I'm not sure I'd call "Exit Ghost" an important novel: it feels more like an epilogue, a sad, necessary denouement to a long-running series. But it's recommended to Roth's fans, and there are still lots of those out there.
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LibraryThing member countrylife
I detest this kind of writing.

This holier-than-thou, you hordes of lower intellect won’t really understand, but herein, I undertake to impart my exalted cerebral wisdom, by infesting my story with tiresome diatribes about things on which my higher erudition deems necessary that you lower
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 untrained classes should change your thinking. And yes, thank you, I do consider myself worthy of your adoration.

Gag. But that’s what I thought of the author while slogging through this thing.

Did his words flow prettily? Yes.
Did he make his physical settings come alive? Not so much.
The story, even, could have been interesting, minus all the brainwashing.

He has one character, while listening to another, think, “I let him go on in that self-delighted and domineering way.” Really? Mister – that describes your whole book.
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LibraryThing member berthirsch
Exit Ghost by Philip Roth, although more novella than full-blown novel, for Roth fans this is still a worthwhile read. The book lacks depth but it touches on themes that readers of contemporary American fiction will find satisfying.

The story is about the familiar, well-known yet fading novelist
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 Nathan Zuckerman who, for much of Roth’s career, has served as his alter-ego. Zuckerman, forced by failed health to abandon his voluntary exile and solitude in the Berkshires, returns to Manhattan (for medical consultations) where he had once been vital, connected and active. His humiliating prostate condition has minimized his libido and resulted in his dependency on diapers. For a man of ego and vitality what can be more of a blow to one’s self esteem than a compromised, leaking penis.

His sexuality in tatters, he meets up with younger versions of his past self and liaisons. Richard Kliman, a young, bright, aggressive self-promoter looking to make a name for himself by writing an exploitive biography of E.I. Lonoff, the famed, yet now ignored and deceased novelist, who served as a mentor figure in the first Zuckerman book- The Ghost Writer. Also appearing from that novel is Amy Bellette, Lonoff’s lover, who also faces illness and is the keeper of Lonoff’s incestuous secrets and finds herself besieged by Kliman’s intrusive phone calls and insistent inquiries.

Kliman’s college girlfriend, Jamie Logan, a 30’ish beauty beset by anxiousness and the self-doubt caused by the unfulfilled promise of her own writing career, stalled since once of her short stories had appeared in The New Yorker. Her husband, Billy, is the typical “nice Jewish boy”, married to a beautiful shiksa whom he lovingly adores and dotes on; (of course this Rothian parody will be familiar to students of his oeuvre). Jamie seeks refuge from the post 9/11 New York City by swapping homes with Zuckerman.

Zuckerman, seeking to regain his lost sexuality and vitality, fantasizes about seducing Jamie but the imagined “he-she” dialogues he composes are trite and under-imagined.

Not to be overlooked much of the action takes place on Election Night 2004 and Roth offers up delicious take-downs of George W. and is clearly unabashed in his excoriating criticisms of Bush, Texas (where Jamie grew up) and how sophisticated New Yorkers were shocked to find that America had re-elected this bumbling fool (even Billy’s Jewish parents in Philadelphia buying into Bush’s pro Israel rhetoric).

For any reader of Roth’s career this is a must read. It is a coda to the Zuckerman journey and it also describes the pathetic dilemma facing baby boomer males as they face their own aging and fading physical prowess. How does one’s physical reality resolve itself to its still youthful fantasies? Does one find resolution in tummy tucks and face lifts seeking out younger lovers or does one age more gracefully seeking out the companionship of like- minded- and- bodied peers?
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LibraryThing member bergs47
Old man returns to New York


Old man chases car like a dog that if he caught it would not know what to do.


Old man talks intellectual claptrap


Old man leaves New York
LibraryThing member pdever
Exit Ghost is an elaborate death fantasy.

It's a story about lost continence and losing one's mind (or maybe just one's memory), and I truly appreciated the way Roth pulled me into that predicament. I was keenly interested by the way he cultivated my trust in Nathan Zuckerman on the one hand and
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 showed him to be an untrustworthy narrator on the other. It was a masterful balancing act, and you could say the same thing about my sympathy for Zuckerman as an unsympathetic character as well. All that speaks to Roth's skill.

I can't say I liked the book, however. I found myself focused on the way Roth used Nathan Zuckerman to write about other literary figures. Was he dropping names? Being pretentious? Showing off? There was some brilliant commentary scattered about, but too often I found that I didn't care what Zuckerman thought about Gerorge Plimpton, or Hemmingway, or Hawthorne . . . I almost didn't care what he (or the other characters) thought about E. I. Lonoff, the literary figure who was the central conceit of the novel.
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LibraryThing member tsutsik
Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York after ten years of absence. Although still a succesful writer he has cut his links with the rest of humanity. In vain he tries to re-attach himself to the world.
The two main themes are very interesting: first his anger over his lost control over his body,
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 second his anger about how biographers reduce and diminish the lives of their subjects to a few sensationalized incidents. I've never read a book which so vividly describes incontinence, and other forms of ailments like the fear of memory loss and dementia. He wants to try an experimental therapy for a cure for his incontinence, in the vain hope he can find his former self: womanizer, man of the world.
I did like the first part of the novel very much - where he states his troubles, observes the changed city, but after finishing I felt a bit disappointed, he seems to have been in a hurry to get to the end. The way he handles jamie, seems quite unrealistic to me, and the end seems to me a trick for Roth to get out of this novel as quickly as possible. Still,you should read it to judge for yourself.
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LibraryThing member reggieandozzie
very different read...inside a man's mind struggling with what life presents
LibraryThing member joancall
Lock up your daughters, ladies. Nathan Zuckerman is back - 71, impotent and incontinant, and he still fancies himself a mover with the young ladies. If he could just transfer some of his great genius from his brain into his heart and his pecker, I would worship him and his work.
LibraryThing member bobbieharv
Yet another of Roth's old lusting man novels. He writes so well, despite this tired theme, that I always enjoy his books, though I'm really starting to feel sorry for him. Interesting, in this one, the way he fobbed the narrator's (and his own) political views off on the young female character.
LibraryThing member PortiaLong
An aging writer returns to NYC after years of seclusion and is confronted with his own fantasies and new drama relating to old acquaintances. Impotent, incontinent and memory failing he vacillates between fantasy and self-pity.
LibraryThing member sggottlieb
Pretty boring. Makes getting old look frustrating and humiliating.
LibraryThing member melancholy
not the best zuckerman novel but clearly still worth reading.
also not a great cover design.
LibraryThing member sinaloa237
Let's be franck: Exit ghost is a bit boring.
It is slow all the way to the end and hardly uplifting.
Just as if Philip Roth is trying too hard: to intelectual, too pessimistic, too obvious also.
Of course it is well written (I have read it in French) and there are very good pages, but the result is
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 not what you expect from such an acclaimed writer.
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LibraryThing member jepeters333
After 11 years of isolation in his New England mountain refuge, Zuckerman returns to New York City and makes three important connections. The first is to a young couple with whom he suggests swapping homes. The second is to Amy, the former muse of Zuckerman's first literary hero, E.I. Lonoff. And
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 the third is to a bold, ambitious Lonoff biographer who is irritatingly persistent. It seems Zuckerman's carefully protected sense of isolation is bound to be shattered.
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LibraryThing member CasualFriday
I didn't love this latest (and last?) installment of Roth's Nathan Zuckerman novels. Zuckerman, impotent and incontinent following prostate surgery, leaves his Berkshires haven for Manhattan. He connects with the lover of his late literary hero, I. E. Lonoff, an aggressive would-be biographer of
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 Lonoff who claims to know a secret, and a young couple with whom he agrees to swap homes for year. The story was absorbing, and the writing as good as always, but the tone put me off. Zuckerman seems to equate his sexual impotency with his literary decline, and that's so facile. He also seems to revere the Great Male Writers with their Big Ideas and their Propulsive Energy, and gives me the impression he would disdain women writers. I've been reading a Roth novel a year, and the recent ones I've read didn't have this vaguely anti-feminist tone.
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LibraryThing member miriamparker
First chapter of this book made me want to strangle myself and stop writing my book and just capitulate that Phillip Roth is just SO MUCH SMARTER than any other writer ever, especially ones who want to write about old writers and editors and ghosts. And then the middle kind of got slow, so I
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 thought, "Well, maybe it's doable." AND THEN I READ THE END and I almost committed suicide in the airport (in a good way, I mean, if you know what my novel is about, you understand.) But I can't give it five stars, because the middle is dull and there is SOME Roth-ian self-indulgence. But this one is good. For real.
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LibraryThing member realbigcat
I decided to read this book based on an article in a Bucknell University Alumni magazine that reference the book. Roth himself is a Bucknell alumnus and I had the book in my library but never read it. You can read the other reviews for the plot but the conflict is that Nathan Zuckerman ( Roth's
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 alter ego) is now 71 and ravaged by incontenence from prostate cancer, In addition he realizes he is having trouble remembering things. This comes into play with the banter between his desire for the young and beautiful Jamie. His lack of sexual inability is not the same as his desire and there in is a struggle that I believe is familiar to many older men. Likewise, is his battle between Kliman the young writer who wants to take on a negative writing a negative book on Zuckermans mentor, E.I. Lonoff. Again his aging body and mind struggle from his younger days when confronting Kliman. I would compare it to the stories of an aging lion. In almost a reverse scenerio is Zuckerman's struggle with finding Lonoff's old lover Amy Bellette who was once beautiful and is now an old woman ravaged by brain cancer. Alll of these conflicts are melded together in this story which I found interesting. I can't say I was a fan of the ending but to me it was worth the read.
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LibraryThing member SallyBrice
Philip Roth may be the greatest living American novelist. One reason for my esteem is his fecundity. This is an odd word choice for such an assertively male author, but it seems appropriate in the way his works are often connected like siblings. One of his most recent books, Exit Ghost (2007) is
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 part of the “Zuckerman series” that go back nearly thirty years. On the surface Exit Ghost displays the logical extension of Nathan Zuckerman’s growing list of physical ailments plaguing the protagonist author over the years. Nor is Zuckerman the only Roth “child” to suffer humiliating markers of age. In the last Kepesh novel, The Dying Animal (2001), David Kepesh is terrified of his potential sexual impotence; in The Humbling (2009) actor Simon Axler has lost his ability to perform in the other meaning of the word.

It is not Zuckerman’s failed prostate and subsequent incontinence in Exit Ghost that provides the character and the reader with the most suspense. That comes from a threatened biography of Zuckerman’s long-ago mentor by a crass young man who is also Nathan’s rival for the attention of one of the lovely young muses who populate Roth’s novels. It is not only the mishandling of a revered teacher’s aesthetic that repulses Zuckerman; it is the revelation of a supposed secret of a sexual nature about the intensely private man that convinces the equally private Zuckerman to block the young man’s efforts. One of the ways he will do this is to propound his own theory that the dead author was writing in his unpublished last work about a hushed-up scandal about an earlier American author, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Is this wheel-within-a-wheel Roth’s clever commentary on the intellectual incest that poses for true cultural exploration?

I, a confessed occasionally prurient reader, was struck by the similarity of Exit Ghost to an earlier Zuckerman novel, I Married a Communist (1998) based on just the kind of gossip-oriented reading Zuckerman and Roth so obviously detest. I can take refuge in the fact that I Married a Communist was perhaps the only roman a clef Roth is guilty of writing. It is clearly a rebuttal to Roth’s ex-wife the actress Claire Bloom’s bitter memoir about their marriage, Leaving a Doll’s House (1996). There are enough sound examinations of issues such as creativity, solitude, Judaism, and political persecution to redeem I Married a Communist, but Exit Ghost shows how many of the same topics can be more satisfyingly dissected with a feather than a sledgehammer.

I give Exit Ghost a 4 out of 5 in comparison with other Roth novels such as The Counterlife (1986), American Pastoral (1997), The Human Stain (2000), When She Was Good (1967), Portnoy's Complaint (1969), and Everyman (2006). Compared to literature as a whole, I would give Exit Ghost a 5.
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LibraryThing member LMHTWB
Exit Ghost is a story of aging writer Nathan Zuckerman's decision to move from his isolation in the country to New York, basically on a whim. Once there, he falls for a young woman and meets an old friend, while fighting a budding author over the publication of a biography of his idol. Throughout
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 the story, Zuckerman faces physical and mental problems related to his age.

I was unprepared for the bleakness and sexual overtones in this book. While the writing itself was outstanding, the subject and tone was far to dark for my morning commute. (I listened to the CD version.) In fact, I put the story aside several times, but, whether because of my perfectionism or basic curiosity, I did eventually finish it.

While I have no problems with dark books, I would like them to cause me to think or examine something in my own life. This book left me feeling like I wasted so much time listening to it.
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LibraryThing member Ameise1
It's a wonderful story and it's written in a marvellous language. Zuckerman, who is living since eleven years away from New York in a quiet neighbourhood in the country, is coming back to the city for a medical examination. He is overwhelmed by the bustling activities of New York and has to learn
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 in a hard way that he no longer belongs to this kind of life. One week long his feelings are going up and down. He meets a young writer couple with whom he would like to swap home for one year. Especially the young woman attracts him and he starts daydreaming about an affair with her. While in reality this wouldn't be possible he starts writing a second story within the main story. A young writer is hassling him to get information about a writer example of Zuckerman's earlier time. While Zuckerman is refusing his assistance the young man is getting more and more ornery. In the end Zuckerman is taking refuge to his lonely home in the country.
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LibraryThing member heidijane
Very clever, slightly weird, funny and satirical, a bit intellectual, obsessive reading...i'm not entirely sure what i thought of this book, to be honest. Did i enjoy it? I'm not sure "enjoy" is the right word. It was a good read, although slow to start with it soon picked up, but i'm left feeling
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 slightly frustrated as i don't think the story has been resolved...at least not to my satisfaction. But what do i know? This is my first Philip Roth book, so maybe thats typical.
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LibraryThing member roblong
Over the past decade or so the urgency brought about by advancing age has been a great boon to Roth, and the quality of the books he has produced has been astonishing (admittedly everybody has one they didn’t get along with; I couldn’t abide The Human Stain). Here I think it works against him.
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 This was involving and had interesting digressions but, despite its strengths, didn’t have the direction or the bite of an American Pastoral or I Married a Communist. Fragments of it will remain in my memory, but I doubt very much that the work as a whole will. That said, the description of life after surgery for prostate cancer will keep me up nights.
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LibraryThing member asxz
I haven't read any Roth for a couple of years and this was a good one to come back to. Still concerned with writing, with his legacy, with his mortality, Zuckerman in his last has never been a more transparently, ghostly version of his creator.

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