Character driven novel w/focus on internal monologue

books:


	• Exit Ghost Philip Roth Houghton Mifflin, 2007 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 45 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

poignant, as always.

I LOVE Philip Roth for his brutal and often embarrassing honesty, his incredibly sharp insight into cultural phenomena and their absurdity about which most of people are oblivious. In Exit Ghost, the protagonist is alot more subdued than in previous Zuckerman books, however, his forced withdrawal makes his observations far more introspective, and his imaginations more personal. I also enjoyed cultural commentaries through his characters about the dangers of tainting literature by cultural journalism.

The past is prologue

This is Nathan Zuckerman's latest novel. For those who may not know, Nathan Zuckerman is Philip Roth's alter ego and is the protagonist in many of Mr. Roth's books. For a decade, Nathan has relocated from the fast paced, daily craziness that is Manhattan to the quietness and solitude of the Berkshires to enable him to better concentrate on his writing. Nathan sees an advertisement of a young, newly married couple who desire to swap their apartment in Manhattan with someone living in a more bucholic environment, far away from the city. Jamie, the young wife in this couple, lives in constant fear of a terrorist attack in post-9/11 New York.

Nathan, now 71, had come to New York for prostate surgery and, then, for post-surgical treatment for incontinence. A secondary effect from the surgery is impotence. Nathan, while in New York, spots from the distance an old friend, Amy Bellette, the lover of the late I.E. Lonoff, a distinguished writer and early hero to Nathan. Amy, once youthful and quite attractive, is old and sick now. Nathan wishes to have lunch with Amy to speak over old times. Nathan who would like to write Lonoff's biography, is in competition with Richard Kleiman for the job. Kleiman allegedly knows a scandalous secret of Lonoff's and is threatening to expose it in his intended biography.

Having answered the young couple's ad and meeting with them, Nathan falls in love with Jamie and finds himself pining for her. Nathan is desparately smitten with her, but is extremely frustrated because of his chronic physical condition. Nathan is no longer the ladies's man he once was. Nathan tries to work out his dilemma by writing a story, which Nathan names, "He and She" which consists of a dialogue between the young woman with the much older man. It touches upon Nathan's current dilemma. Nathan also wishes to protect the infirm Amy from the annoyingly insistent Kleiman.

It is interesting that when Nathan meets Lonoff, his wife, and Lonoff's sweetheart, Amy, Nathan is working on a novel, _Ghost Writer_ about a young woman visiting the Lonoffs who bears a strong resemblance to a famous and beloved Holocaust martyr. Nathan becomes obsessed with her both as a male and a Jew.

What makes _Exit Ghost_ resonate so strongly with me is its keen sensitivity to the plight of the protagonist in his attempts to exorcise, or at least to reconcile, the ghosts of his past with the agonizing realities of the present. _Exit Ghost_ is palpably real and must be a particularly personal and heart felt work to Philip Roth. Therein lies the book's excellence.

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Character driven novel w/focus on internal monologue

Exit Ghost focuses on 71 year old Nathan Zuckerman, writer, thinker, hermit. He comes back to NYC after a 10yr retreat in his rural cabin.
Reading this novel, you become intimate with Zuckerman, his every thought and the rational behind every decision. There are long dialogues with other characters. If you're looking for action, this isn't it. Not much drama happening here, except that created by the characters in their own minds.

Roth writes superb sentences. He summarizes situations profoundly in a few words. The structure and story hold together, and i like the devices Roth uses in writing the novel. It's a solid piece of work.
Personally, it's my opinion that Roth portrays Zuckerman as Joyce portrays S. Daedalus. But Roth would hate that i'm expressing my opinion on his work, and that you're wasting your time reading my opinion. In a perfect literary world, critics wouldn't comment, and readers would consume only the author's work.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

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, Jamie, 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 work The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost is an amazing leap into yet another phase in this great writer's insatiable commitment to fiction.

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