Exit Ghost (Audio CD)

In the black-and-white photo darkening further the back cover of this book-lightened only by his bright pate and face-Philip Roth looks out sternly from lowered brows, challengingly, even daringly, at the reader and, more so, at the reviewer. Roth is long past the point of needing blurbs, but that large author’s photo flies in the face of the rigorous Modernist aesthetic that suffuses this most literary of recent fictions. Given the novel’s reiterated and elaborated view of literature, it is surprising that Roth permitted anything but a title and plain wrappers for his wrap-up of Nathan Zuckerman’s life as a writer (at one point Zuckerman ponders not publishing at all).
Contempt for literary journalism is voiced throughout Exit Ghost by the most favourably presented characters: the reclusive Zuckerman himself, his model of the devoted writer, E.I. Lonoff, and Lonoff’s widow, Amy Bellette. Such attitudes can be traced to the tenets of the New Criticism (inspired by I.A. Richards and championed by F.R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks et al.) and the poetics of the High Modernists (Pound, Eliot, Yeats, A.J.M. Smith), whose Modernism was so high that it seemed the only possible means of participation would be from above (to steal what Leacock said of the Catholic Church in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town). In such a view, nothing matters but the literary work of art itself. Nothing from outside the work-such as biography or any form of cultural study-is relevant. The work of literary art is a self-contained, self-referential/reflexive organic construct. Of course such a demanding aesthetic proved impossible to practice, was tarred as elitist, and was probably destined to be subverted by poststructuralism and postmodernism. Such Modernist theory is also conveniently self-serving. It has often been half-joked that Eliot wrote his criticism to make a place in the great tradition for his own work (and Zuckerman quotes from “Little Gidding”).
But Exit Ghost is also just a novel, an entertainment, as would be the great Lonoff’s short stories, however exquisitely turned for an austere sensibility. As one of Roth’s Jewish mothers might say of his dour, challenging photo: “Mr. Sourpuss, would it kill you to smile?” In this latter phase of Roth’s writing life, I expect it might: he appears to be finished with comedy.
There has been little to laugh about in the most recent novels of the incredibly prolific and once-comic Roth (in an interview, the late Brian Moore said that Roth in person was even funnier than in his fiction). Last year’s Everyman was a disappointed life’s story told from the grave (with its title suggesting that it has ever been thus). Another of Roth’s recurring aesthetes, David Kepesh, is busily (and of course, for Roth, hornily) going about the business of dying in 2001’s The Dying Animal (title taken from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”, where another High Modernist speaker yearns to talk his way out of life’s “sensual music” and into “the artifice of eternity”). Funny, that there have been so few laughs in the recent fiction of the writer who wrote one of the funniest novels ever, Portnoy’s Complaint (with 1995’s Sabbath’s Theater being a notable exception). But then it’s easy to be funny about male puberty and its occupations, and just about impossible to be funny about death and preparations for that proof of futility. There is one great comic scene in Exit Ghost, where seventy-one-year-old Nathan Zuckerman, a maimed survivor of prostate cancer, stands arguing literary-cultural ethics with a virile young man who personifies everything in contemporary culture that Zuckerman thinks an assault on literature. The two men look ready to back off and ram heads, when Zuckerman suddenly realises that the pad inside his plastic underwear is sopping; he gets a whiff of himself, just before the new cock of the walk tells him he’s a smelly old man whose day is done. But that sort of black comedy is the only tingling the reader’s funny bone can expect. The world betrays the life of the mind, and the failing flesh trumps the willing spirit. There’s nothing funny in that, not in Exit Ghost anyway. Or as Roth’s photo might answer: What’s to smile about, Ma?
Poor Zuckerman is leaking not only from bladder but from brain, with full-blown Alzheimer’s perhaps imminent. (I don’t enjoy making invidious comparisons to one of my favourite Canadian novelists, but it is instructive to observe how well Roth does the onset of Alzheimer’s compared with Richler’s portrayal in Barney’s Version; Barney begins stuttering and dithering and forgetting, and never does much more than more of the same; Zuckerman, impotent already from prostate surgery, poignantly recognises the beginning of the end of his life’s true passion: commanding the right word.) All is lost for all those whom Zuckerman dubs the “no-longers” (as opposed to the “not-yets”, the young): Amy Bellette is missing part of her brain and her tumour has recurred; old friends have died and Zuckerman hadn’t heard (or has forgotten). The world of letters is stalked by a monstrous culture of sensationalist gossip, and the private life is about to succumb wholly to the public world epitomised in the ubiquitous cell phone. Not only will there be no more literature, but the kind of mind that appreciates and enjoys the engagement of fiction is going, going, gone. As Lonoff posthumously dictates to his channelling widow (you’ll have to read the novel): “Reading/writing people, we are finished, we are ghosts witnessing the end of the literary era-take this down.” Indeed, Exit Ghost is something of a taking-down, a reckoning and dismantling, and a bearing witness to the pop-cultural demolition.
Here, the human comedy is all tragedy, if suffused with pathos-with sorrow, sadness, and regret, and even, for both readers and author, with indulgence in what Richard B. Wright’s Wes Wakeham calls the “nostalgies”. Zuckerman remains as much the compulsive cogitator as eponymous Hamlet, whose play provides the novel’s title and perhaps its motif of incest between brother and half-sister. In a roundabout way, the incest theme returns Nathaniel Hawthorne to Exit Ghost. Apparently Hawthorne was accused of breaking the taboo, and it may have been with Hawthorne in mind that Lonoff attempted his first, teasingly autobiographical novel, whose incest theme incites biographer Kliman to attempt the great exposé that will recover Lonoff’s contribution to American literature even as it turns his great fiction into psychobabble.
In recent years, at least from The Human Stain onward (and maybe beginning with 1997’s American Pastoral), Roth has been writing in the company of his great American 19th-century predecessors (Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau). As with Hawthorne especially, Roth’s imagination has been ambitious, bold, and sure as an Old Testament prophet’s (that author photo); moral-ethical matters (sins) both individual and collective have as important a place as aesthetic interests. The fiction recalls Hawthorne’s even to the extent that characters leave and return home much changed and of suspect motives (as in The Scarlet Letter, for instance, and the fascinating story “Wakefield”). But then, Nathan Zuckerman has always been nominally connected to Nathaniel Hawthorne. And in Roth’s fiction, America has always been manifestly destined to betray its best self repeatedly.
But the ostensible intertext of (or ghost story behind) Exit Ghost is Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, which provides the novel’s premise. The eleven-year recluse-as bedazzled, bemused, befuddled, and finally beleaguered as if having slept through it all-returns to New York, the centre of the world of busy-ness, to find all changed (those ridiculous cell phones stuck to everybody’s head, making the metropolis appear like a madhouse of self-talkers). All changed, that is, but Zuckerman’s dormant essential self, whose roused desires and vain hopes are almost immediately back in action, if unfit for the fray. It was hope of a cure for incontinence that brought him to New York, and that one hope led, inevitably it must seem, to others: a renewed desire not for sex but for the thrill of romance and seduction, the gendered drama, the male dominance of it-the vision of beauty as truth in a knickerbocker Beatrice, Jamie Logan (originally from Texas, family friend of the Bushes).
The female object of Zuckerman’s desire (object, as there is little individuated in her before old Nathan is heels-over-head in love with her) is either the most complex or the least understandable aspect of Exit Ghost. Jamie is a younger version of Amy, and in The Ghost Writer (1979) Nathan desired and fantasised wildly about Amy when he was a twenty-three-year-old writer visiting Lonoff, whose long-suffering wife eventually freed him to marry Amy. But it is difficult to determine just what Jamie is outside of Nathan’s strangely disconnected desire and fusing imagination. Saviour? Muse? Femme fatale? Foil to his desire, as Richard Kliman the would-be exposé artist is to Lonoff and the literary life? All of these? The novel is also structured on such parallels, with accompanying reverberations and repercussions. But as this is a review and not a critical article, readers can be left to puzzle things through to their own delight. And it is a delight.
Obviously, then, Exit Ghost is uber-literary in keeping with its High Modernist/New Critical principles, richly referential and rewardingly allusive. They were a deadly serious bunch, those great Anglo-American mid-20th-century writers and critics (we had Frye). Somewhat oddly, the one-time young-Turk Roth has become more of their party. Unsurprisingly, his characters and narrators disdain the postmodern (even though his novels of the past 30 years are full of the kind of narratrickery that is attributed only to experimentalists-mistakenly so, as the fabulous fictions of Hawthorne alone should remind us). The Human Stain, set partly in academia, contained a sustained attack on all that is post-structuralist, postmodern, and politically correct, most especially feminism and postcolonialism. True, some of Roth’s characters are too much strawmen/women, and so the more difficult-to-answer arguments from the positions they represent are either never made or beyond them (say, a sophisticated view of literature as inextricably involved with history and histories of oppression). Regardless, after reading the arguments of Exit Ghost, I would not want to play devil’s advocate against the side, Roth’s, with which I am more sympathetic. And to Roth’s credit, the bête noire of Exit Ghost, rampant Kliman, makes his case, though everything favourable in this novel still flatly denies it and him.
I am left to wonder, though, why Roth’s writing characters insist on such a radical demarcation between fiction and life (especially as Zuckerman at one point calls Lonoff’s life another “story”; and even more especially as Zuckerman’s life story mirrors Roth’s life as a writer). Writers don’t truly create; their material, even their most fantastical inventions, comes from elsewhere, from life. In this regard, there are slippages in Exit Ghost, and at least one blatant transgression, which suggest a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do dictum. Roth’s version of the real-life George Plimpton becomes a late addition and fixation in the novel. Plimpton is venerated by Zuckerman; so unless Plimpton was a saint, his life is distorted compellingly in Roth’s fiction. Is it kosher to portray the recently deceased in a work of fiction, tendentiously so, however favourably from the author’s point of view? No, not if the writing is to respect the attic aesthetic Exit Ghost enunciates at every turn. Does Philip Roth’s fiction matter more than George Plimpton’s life? If the writer’s answer to that question is yes-life feeds fiction and fiction’s what matters most-then why is it such a travesty for the fictional Kliman to use fictional Lonoff’s life in his writing? And even more questionably, or contradictorily, Roth has Zuckerman forge all manner of connections between Plimpton’s character, Plimpton’s life, and Plimpton’s idiosyncratic new journalism-the postmodern genre that determinedly blurs the distinction between the facts and bio-fiction, as here a real-life person, Plimpton, intrudes on Roth’s fiction. Does answering that Exit Ghost is fiction and that what Kliman wants to write within that fiction is non-fiction make a clear case for the defence? Who’s kidding whom? Such dizzying “jazzing around” in fiction (as John Gardner called it) suggests, if anything, a retrograde postmodernism.
So what? To what purpose these quibbles, for that’s all they are? Roth doesn’t write female characters convincingly either. Oh well. Alice Munro, his equivalent in the short story, doesn’t write male characters well; men are the ghosts in her great fiction. So what? In Philip Roth the English-language novel has its paramount practitioner. I cannot imagine another writer in a hundred years creating a comparable body of work (especially if, as prophesied by Exit Ghost, there’s not a literary world to encourage and welcome it). With Roth, every paragraph has its delights (in fact his paragraphs could serve teachers and writers as models of the well wrought). The only American novelist approaching Roth’s achievement would be John Updike (who clears a new work from his lungs after each day’s first deep breath), and the impending death of Nathan Zuckerman (given the title, this is likely the last of him) reminds me of the death in Rabbit at Rest of Updike’s recurrent Rabbit Angstrom. They are two very different American male characters of the last century who have perfectly represented their constituencies: the writing lifers and the quietly desperate lifers. Anyone who does not mourn the end of such characters in his or her reading life does not deserve an Updike or Roth. But we can forgive such readers, they know not what they’re missing. And we can always re-read.
Gerald Lynch (Books in Canada)
--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Philip Roth's 28th book is, it seems, the final novel in the Zuckerman series, which began in 1979 with The Ghostwriter. A 71-year-old Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York after more than a decade in rural New England, ostensibly to see a doctor about a prostate condition that has left him incontinent and probably impotent. But Zuckerman being Zuckerman and Roth being Roth, the plot is much more complicated than it at first appears. Within a few days of arriving in New York, Zuckerman accidentally encounters Amy Bellette, the woman who was once the muse/wife of his beloved idol, writer S.I. Lonoff; he also meets a young novelist and promptly begins fantasizing about the writer's young and beautiful wife. There's also a subplot about a would-be Lonoff biographer, who enrages Zuckerman with his brashness and ambition, two qualities a faithful Roth reader can't help ascribing to the young, sycophantic Zuckerman himself. As usual, Roth's voice is wise and full of rueful wit, but the plot is contrived (the accidental meeting with Amy, for example, is particularly unbelievable) and the tone hovers dangerously close to pathetic. In the Rothian pantheon, this one lives closer to The Dying Animal than Everyman. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.