Most helpful customer reviews
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5.0 out of 5 stars
a little miracle, Jun 27 2004
This impossible-to-synopsize novel is elegant, evocative, funny, sharp in its characterizations, profound in its suggestiveness. I cannot understand calling it "unstructured," as one reviewer here has -- it is a miracle of craft. It is about writing in a fairly direct way, about imagination and "fantasy," but too about the unknowability of ordinary people, about the hackles truth can raise because truth is always necessarily partial, unreachable. This is not just a writer who knows what he's doing. He knows what we're all doing.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Minor masterpiece, April 21 2004
This is the best novel I've read all year. It's 1956 and Nathan Zuckerman, a twenty-three year old literary wannabe from the Village, spends the night at the Berkshires home of his latest literary idol: E. I. Lonoff, a reclusive, meticulous literary genius with seven volumes of stories to his name and a seething hatred for the New York literary scene. Thrown into the mix are Lonoff's long-suffering wife, Hope ("It's like being married to Tolstoy"), and the young Amy Bellette - ostensibly a student, but who might also be Lonoff's mistress and the ultimate literary victim of Nazi persecution who just happened to make it out alive. Given it's narrated by Nathan from a distance of more than twenty years, the situation is ripe for self-impaling humour, and Roth's effortless voice slides the stake home pitilessly. ("To indicate that it was all right with me if I was being condescended to and that I would understand if I was soon asked to leave, I went red.") So many Bildungsroman use fond self-deprecation as a cover for self-love, but Roth's novel doesn't have a single disingenuous line. If this novel were only a comedic recollection of youth, what Roth gives us would be more than enough but, as it proceeds, "The Ghost Writer" becomes not only an exploration of what Henry James called "the madness of art" but something far more specific. Nathan, Lonoff and Amy (at least as Nathan imagines her) are all Jewish writers, and through the decisions they've made about their work and their lives, Roth manages to turn this social comedy into an artful exploration of what it means to be a Jewish writer and the kind of obligation - if any - that entails. Should the Jewish writer suppress aspects of his work to avoid or counter anti-Semitism? Should he ensure that the characters in all his stories "represent a fair sample of the kinds of people that make up a typical contemporary community of Jews?" (p.103) Or should he be honest and risk including something that might "warm the heart of a Julius Streicher or a Joseph Goebbels?" (p.104). It's a worthy topic for consideration, and the real achievement of this novel is that Roth manages to address it in a way that's hilarious, sophisticated, moving and profound - in almost equal parts. It's so rare to find a novel this enjoyable which has something important to say. I loved it.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
Very convoluted and unstructured, even for Roth, Feb 2 2004
Roth is not the typical author. He doesn't subscribe to conventional wisdom of beginning, climax, conclusion, etc. He concentrates on characters, issues and dialogue. This book, however, didn't seem to satisfy me. Though this novel is short, he delves into a serious subject of whether artists are responsible for society, themselves, or art itself.Roth describes how Nathan Zuckerman, a promising new author, meets and stays with one of his idols in American literature. The conversation seems to lag, and gets to the point in a roundabout and unreal way. Roth then presents a flashback of how Zuckerman had to sacrifice his family relationship for the sake of publishing one story concerning his family and Jewish heritage. Then things took a turn for the worse, when Roth incorporates a wild personal narrative of Anne Frank surviving the holocaust, while refusing to reveal herself. It is intriguing look into responsibility of an artist, but it's way of presenting the issues is almost laughable. While I admire Roth and especially the Human Stain, I can't say I found this one up to par.
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by Philip Roth
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