Exit Ghost (review)

144 Philip Roth. Exit Ghost. Boston: Houghton, 2007. 294 pp. $26.00. To begin with the allusive title, “Exit Ghost” is a stage direction from Hamlet (act 1, scene 1). Roth’s late phase has been replete with Shakespearean references : the epigraph from Sabbath’s Theater (1994)—“Every third thought shall be my grave”—is taken from The Tempest, and there are frequent allusions to that play and to King Lear in the novel. Coleman Silk’s father in The Human Stain (2000) is a devout Shakespearean who gives Coleman the middle name of Brutus. The most memorable scene in Roth’s last novel, Everyman (2006), is an exchange between the unnamed protagonist and a gravedigger that implicitly invokes the famous opening scene of the final act of Hamlet. Like Everyman, Exit Ghost is preoccupied with death and what precedes it. Whereas the former was most concerned with the physical symptoms of aging, the new novel meditates not just on Zuckerman’s impotence and incontinence (recalling passages from American Pastoral [1997] and particularly The Human Stain) but also on his mental frailties—the struggle to retain the incisive memory that is such an essential tool of the novelist’s craft. However, the title also refers, self-reflexively, to The Ghost Writer (1979), the first of Roth’s Zuckerman novels, according to the taxonomy of Roth’s publications that has been appearing at the front of his books since The Human Stain (which is inaccurate, strictly speaking, as Nathan Zuckerman actually made his first appearance in My Life as a Man [1974], albeit as the creation of a character, Peter Tarnopol, who has not recurred in Roth’s subsequent fiction). Indeed, this latest novel has been touted as the final appearance of Roth’s long time alter ego, although skeptical readers might recall that Zuckerman has previously been killed off in The Counterlife (1986) and The Facts (1987) and subsequently resurrected. At any rate, Exit Ghost is certainly, as the dust jacket blurb aptly puts it, “[h]aunted by . . . The Ghost Writer.” Indeed, it is a belated sequel, in the sense that it tells the story of what happens to E. I. Lonoff, the mentor of the Zuckerman of that earlier novel, and to the maestro’s young lover, Amy Bellete (whom Zuckerman imagines to be the reincarnated “ghost” of the would-be writer and celebrated victim of the Holocaust, Anne Frank). At one point in the new novel, Lonoff even appears as a ghost with whom Zuckerman converses—an episode that Zuckerman compares to that in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, in which the speaker meets a “compound ghost” (usually taken by critics to represent W. B. Yeats). Exit Ghost also reprises themes from other volumes in Zuckerman Bound, a trilogy of novels that comprises The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound Copyright © 2008 Heldref Publications Reviews Reviews Philip Roth Studies 145 (1981), and The Anatomy Lesson (1983), followed by a novella that Roth called an “epilogue,” The Prague Orgy (1985). Most notably, the confrontation that is at the center of Exit Ghost between “literary lunatic” (273) Richard Kliman, the aspiring writer and would-be biographer of E. I. Lonoff, and Zuckerman, in which the former moves swiftly from identification and flattery—“I’m not the prodigy you were [. . .]. But I’m trying to do no more or less than you did” (44)—to resentment and invective—“You stink [. . .] you smell bad! Crawl back into your hole and die!” (104)—is a variation on the battles for literary supremacy and the ethical high ground between Alvin Pepler and Zuckerman in Zuckerman Unbound and between Zuckerman and Milton Appel in The Anatomy Lesson. It also has echoes of the rivalrous encounter between “Roth” and Pipik in Operation Shylock (1993). Moreover, large portions of Exit Ghost are given over to a series of imaginary dialogues between two gendered speakers (“He” and “She”), whose mixture of literary debate, flirtation, and self-conscious role-playing is very reminiscent of the pairs of lovers whose conversations compose Deception (1990). The fate of Lonoff’s incomplete novel—retrieved by Kliman from a frail, postoperative Amy Bellette and discarded at the end of the novel by Zuckerman —again...