New from Philip Roth

Published: 2007 - November, Culture, Current Affairs

Women of a certain age who try anything to keep young make us smile with affection. But when a celebrated 70-year-old writer, an intellectual powerhouse, is out to find his long-gone youth at all costs, ignoring his prostate and incontinence problems in his failed attempt to seduce a young married woman with literary ambitions, he cannot but make himself look ridiculous. This is the main theme around which turns Exit Ghost, the ghost of lost virility, the impalpable specter of physical and mental decline which torments Nathan Zuckerman. Roth’s alter ego, Zuckerman, in a whirling game of roles, enlists his intelligence and womanizing charm in the service of a pathetic courtship of young Jamie, a splendid 30-year-old whom Zuckerman meets and agrees to swap houses with. Jamie and her husband, Billy, both writers seeking prominence, have put an ad in the New York Review of Books, offering to swap their Upper West Side apartment for a house in the country. This, because following 9/11 Jamie is too scared to stay in New York. And once again the Big Apple serves as backdrop for this surreal threesome, dominated by old overbearing and statuary Nathan Zuckerman. The old man has been living in the country for ten years during which he has not published a single book. Memory, among other old-age frailties, begins to fail him, making him face the ultimate danger of literary incoherence. The year is 2004, post 9/11, just before the U.S. presidential election, with the media reporting daily about the Bush-Kerry duel, the main subject of conversation in the New York intellectual circles, over a drink or a cappuccino. But old Zuckerman has other things to think about. Besides his frequent visits with the urologist, Nathan has one thing on his mind: pull Jamie away from her adoring husband, Billy.
Through spicy dialogues and witty innuendos the novel shows Roth to be in grand form with his usual biting originality. A Roth-Zuckerman who performs with his sly courtship of Jamie a sort of funereal self-celebration of the great writer that he is, while Jamie and Billy pretend to hang on every word he says. Within this psychological tangle, quite common in Roth’s novels, the writer plays in various registers, keeping the reader from losing sight of the story. The three are joined by other characters throughout the novel. One of them is Jamie’s lover, the wide-eyed, opportunistic Richard Kliman who is working on a biography of E. I. Lonoff, a 1950s short-story writer and Nathan’s idol. For Zuckerman, Kliman represents everything that is hateful in the human race: from meanness to opportunism, from unbridled ambition combined with the self-congratulatory sarcasm of the young to impudent stupidity. In short, Nathan detests him, but must also examine his own conscience. At bottom, also the renowned novelist was once a penniless aspiring writer sitting at the foot of great novelists and hoping for a shred of glory.
The authentic and scabrous conflict around which the whole novel turns is between youth and old age, freshness and decadence, health and sickness, stupidity and intelligence, even if numbed by age. The ghost exiting through the service door is a man who can’t resign himself to the effects of time because deep down, behind his wrinkles, beyond the easy conquest, death is waiting. And sex, even for a novelist like Zuckerman, is the strongest antidote, but not the only one. Discovering Amy Bellette, whom he last met decades ago and who is no longer young, ravaged by a brain surgery, would help Nathan come back to himself and allow him to see beyond the infirmities of old age.