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Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007. 292 pp. $26.00.
When Nathan Zuckerman, in Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost, descends from his mountain retreat to reenter the teeming world of the twenty-first century, he finds himself much too easily seduced by the very things of this world that he’d hoped to elude. Having departed from New York City eleven years ago, Zuckerman, now seventy-one, reemerges, with characteristic, cryptic panache, “out of character for the character I’d become” (p. 15). Having made a hasty retreat in response to a series of antisemitic death-threats, the aging Nathan Zuckerman has secluded himself in idyllic rural western Massachusetts, devoting himself entirely to his writing, with brief forays into the small town of Athena. Zuckerman, having undergone a radical prostatectomy, returns to New York City seeking treatment for incontinence. Indeed, it is only the lure of even the most minimal alleviation of his symptoms that draws him off his mountaintop and back to the world of forced communion with others.
As the older if not wiser Zuckerman contends of his self-imposed isolation, “When my books are published, I keep to myself. I write every day of the week . . . isn’t the work all I need, the work and the working? What does it matter any longer if I’m incontinent and impotent?” (p. 5). Yet it is with considerable dispatch that he agrees to submit to a procedure that he hopes will restore him, if not entirely, then tenuously to something resembling his former self. For no amount of protestation can obfuscate Zuckerman’s longing to be in the world, to be virile once again.
Having lived out of time for so long, Zuckerman unguardedly steps into the future, unprepared for, among other things, the onslaught of technological gadgetry, especially the omnipresent distraction of the cell phone. In what can only be described as a brilliant Rothian satire of the willful idiocy of human consumption, the stunned Zuckerman walks the streets of Manhattan in smug fascination of the cell phone craze: “I remembered a New York when the only people walking up Broadway seemingly talking to themselves were crazy” (p. 64). But it is back on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 2004 in the urology reception room of Mt. Sinai Hospital that Zuckerman ironically but inevitably reencounters his past. And he does so in the specter of the much older and visibly declining but nonetheless all-too-present Amy Bellette, who almost half a century ago was the lover of the young Zuckerman’s literary idol E. I. Lonoff, at whose home in 1956 they unforgettably met. And so it is that Nathan Zuckerman, “precipitously stepping into a new future . . . had retreated unwittingly into the past—a retrograde trajectory not that uncommon, but uncanny anyhow” (p. 52). The intersection of the past, the present, and the future impetuously propels Zuckerman through the streets of Manhattan and into a house-swapping deal with Billy Davidoff, son of a Jewish umbrella and luggage family, and his wife, Jamie Logan, who is close in age to the younger Amy Bellette of Zuckerman’s youth, a winsome writer, politically traumatized by Bush’s reelection, despite (or because of) her Houston socialite background and Republican parents, and with whom, predictably, Zuckerman quickly becomes utterly enthralled, reawakening in him the “ghost of [his] desire” (p. 66).
In many ways, of course, Jamie is to Zuckerman what Amy was to Lonoff, whose long-suffering spouse left him. Jamie’s husband, however, the naïvely smitten Davidoff, has no intention of budging, and Jamie, herself, is disinclined to take-up romantically with Zuckerman. Foiled in his absurdly and regressively frustrated sexual fascination, Zuckerman constructs an imagined romance, a play within a play, in which, if in fact he can’t have it, he can at least write the titillating prelude to a budding affair between “He and She.” As if the counter-transferential complexities aren’t sufficiently complicated, Zuckerman is accosted by a young freelance journalist, Richard Kliman, intent upon writing a biography of E. I. Lonoff in which he will expose Lonoff’s “great secret.” Zuckerman not only sees himself and his past, posturing self-invention in Kliman, but he hates and fears the young writer, the would-be biographer who would, in exposing Lonoff’s transgressions, ruin the writer’s reputation.
For Zuckerman sees himself in E. I. Lonoff as well. If Kliman is Zuckerman’s past, then Lonoff, had he lived long enough, would be Zuckerman’s present, an aging writer subject to the whims of the unrestrained biographer. Zuckerman replaces Lonoff, becoming his older self, “no longer my senior by thirty-odd years. I am yours now by ten” (p. 107), no necessity then for the younger Zuckerman to slay the literary father, that task having been accomplished for him by Lonoff’s premature death. Thus, in the ghost of Lonoff and the annoyingly alive Kliman, Zuckerman views both his older projected self and younger projected self, both fantasized versions of the man he was and is.
But who is the ghost in Roth’s novel, the ghost who so gracefully and skillfully exits at the novel’s close? Is it Lonoff, who “in death . . . was more corpulent than in life” (p. 167)? The young Zuckerman, who emerges in fantasy in the impertinently brazen Kliman? The ghost of the young tantalizing Amy Bellette, now, ill and aged, rapidly on her way to becoming a very real ghost herself? The ghost of Manhattan, whose streets have been overtaken by a generation of unreflective cell phone enthusiasts and technophiles? Is Roth’s ghost the phantom of America, no longer the place of rhapsodic possibility, but now given way to terrorism, vulgar politics, and gimmickry? Or perhaps it’s the ghost of the twentieth century, leaving unrepentant memory in its wake? Or is it Nathan Zuckerman, who, at the close of the novel, slips surreptitiously away, after chastising himself in the words of his fictionalized “She,” who accuses him of having “lost all sense of proportion and entered into a desperate story of unreasonable wishes” (p. 291)?
Finally, the “ghost” is, of course, as it has been ever since Everyman with Roth, the specter of death. It is the ghost of death that Zuckerman hopes to exorcise. And he will attempt to keep death at bay by writing, by creating fictions that reawaken possibility. Zuckerman, back in the safety of his mountain retreat at the novel’s close, will acknowledge that “like everyone in the cemetery who had braved the feat and the task, I would die too” (p. 280), though not before he writes the final scene of his script. For Roth, the focus is always the talismanic power of words to transform life and reinvent self, while all the while, reminding us of the impossibility of doing so. Through writing, it is the ghost of desire that Roth hopes to reinvoke, to resurrect in the aging Zuckerman, in which case “exit ghost” can only be seen as ironic. Despite the fact that Zuckerman writes himself out of his play at the end of the novel—“Gone for good” (p. 292)—it is not an end but a beginning, “the Beginning and the End of Now,” as Zuckerman would have it (p. 41). Exit Ghost is self-referentially playful to the end, for the ghost of desire is desire itself.
Victoria Aarons
Trinity University, San Antonio |
