Exit Ghost (review)

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...