Book Review: Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

Philip Roth has not yet left the building. We will note that Roth, growing more in his later years, has already taken pains to prepare us for the inevitable. His alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman has ushered us through the epic demises of disgraced academic Coleman Silk of “The Human Stain” (2000) and mortal Jersey paladin Swede Levov of “American Pastoral” (1997), each a quietus less about one character than all of us looking on.

Roth begins his eminently morose and typically masterful novella “Everyman” (2006) with a funeral. Even without Zuckerman, there is still no peace in the valley. In a rundown Jersey cemetery, the ceremony ends as a throng of disparate and hesitant mourners disperses from the grave of Roth’s nameless protagonist “and he was left behind.” The sideshow ordeals of the life and the funeral are finished, leaving the main attraction ahead, those incisive and featherless buzzards of judgment.

“Of course, as when anyone dies, though many were grief-stricken, others remained unperturbed, or found themselves relieved, or, for reasons good or bad, were genuinely pleased.”

Readers are never just in the cemetery with Roth, we are six feet underground, under the ruins of once-vibrant Newark, a shattered site Roth has built into a place just as significantly American as Graceland or Tupelo. We are covering the plots with dirt as much as we are punching down the earth to keep its ghosts contained. And of the fist, the one that America’s greatest living writer has used to waylay our sensibilities for nearly a half-century, memory and rancor make the two strongest fingers.

Thus, we arrive at “Exit Ghost” (2007) where Nathan Zuckerman is essentially already dead. Hiding away at his New England haven “on a dirt road in the deep country,” for the past eleven years, Zuckerman makes rare human contact and revels in a curmudgeonly, hermitic existence.

“I don’t go to dinner parties, I don’t go to movies, I don’t watch television, I don’t own a cell phone or a VCR or a DVD player or a computer. I continue to live in the Age of the Typewriter and have no idea what the World Wide Web is. I no longer bother to vote.”

And yet, we find Zuckerman in the reception area, a slightly different version of the waiting room he has created for himself in the Berkshires. Here is Zuckerman, begrudgingly going through the pages of People in a urologist’s office in Manhattan, inquiring about a procedure to have his incontinence allayed. Zuckerman claims to be dreaming of the pool at the college most in proximity to his hideout, but “back on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, not many blocks from where I’d once lived as a vigorous, healthy young man,” the nostalgic Zuckerman cannot help but take the challenge.

“Exit Ghost,” in both its foundational characters and title, tie directly into the first Zuckerman book “The Ghost Writer” (1979). In “The Ghost Writer,” a young and promising Nathan Zuckerman spends the night in the home of his literary idol, E.I. Lonoff, watches Lonoff’s marriage disintegrate, and falls in love with Lonoff’s mistress, a college student whom Zuckerman is convinced is really Anne Frank, having survived the war, changed her now-famous name, and become smitten with the prolific Lonoff.

The book is really about young Zuckerman realizing the alienation that his future vocation assures, the endless hours ahead to be spent “turning over sentences,” and Zuckerman’s affection for the literary tradition. Though “The Ghost Writer” is dedicated to Milan Kundera, it is believed that Lonoff represents either Bernard Malamud or Henry Roth.

Now in “Exit Ghost”, Zuckerman spots Lonoff’s former lover, Amy Bellette, as he leaves the hospital. Frailer than Zuckerman and dying of cancer, he follows her, but does not approach her. In turn, we follow Zuckerman as he traipses through Manhattan as only Zuckerman can: stopping by The Strand to repurchase all of Lonoff’s books, instructing passionately about the late or final works of Strauss and George Plimpton and Joseph Conrad, defying an impulse to visit Ground Zero (it “would have been wholly out of character for the character I’d become”), and walking the old familiar rooms of the Met. Along the way, we pain at this Luddite Zuckerman during a tirade about the unnerving ubiquity of cell phones.

“Exit Ghost” is not about Zuckerman’s New York, but it is where Roth fulfills most of his promises. Roth envisions Zuckerman as a modern day Rip Van Winkle, but instead of leaving the issue at a banal allusion, Roth invokes the meat of the fable, injecting its historical significance, of going to sleep a British subject and awaking as a citizen of the United States, a country he’s never heard of. Here is Zuckerman walking through midtown with “Rip’s rusty gun in my hand and his ancient clothes on my back and an army of the curious crowding around to look me over, this eviscerated stranger walking in their midst, a relic of bygone days amid the noises and buildings and workers and traffic.”

Beyond these moments, there is a plot in which Zuckerman reunites with the infirm and impoverished Amy Bellette and tries to fend off an enterprising journalist from destroying the reputation of the long-dead and largely-forgotten Lonoff . Zuckerman also nearly decides to swap his house for an apartment on the Upper West Side owned by a young married couple (the wife, of course, becomes the object of Zuckerman’s allegedly-left-for-dead libido, which he harnesses into a written play of imagined conversations).

However, Zuckerman’s memory is failing him along with his body. As promised by “The Ghost Writer,” the two most defining organs of the Zuckerman legacy are on the cusp of being obsolete. Ill-equipped to be powerless, Zuckerman bolts for the harborage of the Berkshires, where he will die “like Amy, like Lonoff, like Plimpton, like everyone who had braved the feat and the task.”

I would add “like Elvis” to that list. “The Ghost Writer” is Roth’s version of those early Memphis recordings, which some devotees cherish most because of how the youthful sounds echoed hauntingly with promise. “Exit Ghost” is Roth’s dénouement, those late Vegas specials where America saw a man, like Zuckerman, beyond his faculties, at his most honest and human. They represent imperfect bookends to something definitively ours and definitively American, something massive in scope, which will mark the time between generations.