Being a Part of It

...Does freeing oneself to write make one’s life a prison...

...Many critics will see Exit Ghost as a return to the solipsistic mirroring and metafictional concerns which informed the Zuckerman trilogy...

...Zuckerman first took center stage as Roth’s fictional doppelgänger in the brilliant 1979 novel The Ghost Writer, where he was a young writer making a pilgrimage to the mountain retreat of a famously reclusive Jewish author named E.I...

...One might have imagined,” Zuckerman thinks, “a regeneration of intensity—and, with it, of productivity— in an original writer of such imposing fortitude, still not quite into his 60s, who had arranged finally to escape this imprisoning regimen...

...Exit Ghost is an epilogue with large ambitions, however...

...One can’t help hoping, though, that Zuckerman—despite age and incontinence, impotence and craziness—will once again perform his Houdini-like magic in the pages of another novel by Philip Roth...

...It’s our time,’ George said to me, his singular voice ringing with its spirited confidence...

...Zuckerman has made the same bargain—trading life for art—that his hero Lonoff forged...

...Like the ur-novel from which it takes its title, this one eschews the Balzacian length of the political works to return to the more closely framed narrative and selfexamining focus of previous Zuckerman incarnations...

...Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning...

...And do we have the moral right to implicate others in that bargain...

...Simplicity...

...I looked around and I thought, This is how I will live...

...Within its slender frame Roth engages the big questions that lie at the heart of a writer’s life...

...And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste...

...But he keeps popping up, as people will when they don’t really exist in the first place...

...One is catching sight of the clearly ill Amy Bellette in a coffee shop near the hospital, recalling the girl he met years ago at 23 and unleashing a meditation on the consequences of Lonoff’s leaving his retreat to live with Amy—his talent spinning into artistic impotence, leaving behind an unfinished novel when he succumbed to a relatively early death...

...Is the bargain itself Faustian...

...Seclusion...

...Tw o events at the beginning of Exit Ghost simultaneously thrust Zuckerman back into the past and forward into the present moment...

...Does the exercise of art require the sacrifice of life...

...Then I come back in and write another sentence...

...To understand what he is getting at, it is helpful to recall the ambiguous ending of Roth’s original Ghost, following the famous writer Lonoff down the mountain after his “runaway spouse, some five minutes into her doomed journey in search of a less noble calling...

...But life itself is expensive...

...But Exit Ghost upends the comfortable disengagement from self with the noisy reappearance of physical desire—pointlessly, absurdly, stubbornly resurgent even in the face of certain frustration...

...THE SOLITUDE Zuckerman has so fiercely nursed in his long exile has another unexpected consequence: the loss of self...

...I turn sentences around...

...She is quite literally a ghost of herself, having devoted the greatest part of her life to the memory of the five years she spent with Lonoff after his wife walked out on him at the end of The Ghost Writer...

...Zuckerman’s subsequent mirrorings are not limited to a single narrative identity, however...

...Amy Bellette, the young woman who, along with Zuckerman and the eminent Lonoff, occupies the center of the earlier novel, is now a brain cancer patient...

...That, and death itself...

...Meeting the couple whose apartment he is proposing to occupy, he is also surprised by the strength of his desire for the beautiful 30-year-old wife...

...That writer, in turn, was a stand-in—to a highly recognizable degree—for the writer Bernard Malamud, a role model and close friend of Roth’s...

...He has tasted “the pleasures of being unanswerable and being free— paradoxically, free above all of oneself...

...And there is no arguing with the body’s “facts...

...Serenity...

...The antonym of doppelgänger...

...Since the The Ghost Writer, Roth’s counterpart has appeared in Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and The Prague Orgy (1985)— published as a trilogy (with epilogue) in the volume Zuckerman Bound...

...Reflecting on the unexpected death of his friend George Plimpton, Zuckerman says near the end: “Suddenly my way of being had no justification, and George was my—what is the word I’m looking for...

...Suddenly George Plimpton stood for all that I had squandered by removing myself as forcefully as I had and retreating onto Lonoff ’s mountain...

...What Roth is asking here is whether at this moment in history—after the attacks of 9/11, after the disastrous turn our country’s political climate has taken since the election of George W. Bush and his cronies—it is possible simply to turn one’s back, leave town, choose art over life, turn off the radio, cancel one’s subscription to the newspaper...

...Hoping to be cured at least of the latter by a New York urologist, Zuckerman has come to Manhattan for the first time in more than a decade...

...W e have to be a part of it too.’” He counters the dictum that “we have to be a part of it” with the cautionary tale of Lonoff ’s failed search for freedom...

...The second event—though it is perhaps an exaggeration to call it that— witnesses the 70-year-old Zuckerman unwittingly drawn into the sense of possibility engendered by the energy of the city itself...

...Somehow, art requires an impossible balance on the point of this paradox...

...Zuckerman purports to be making his final, final departure from the scene in Roth’s new book, Exit Ghost...

...Recalling that the Zuckerman Bound trilogy closed with an epilogue in the form of a novella, one is tempted to see this novel in the same light...

...All one’s concentration and flamboyance and originality reserved for the grueling, exalted, transcendent calling...

...Seduced by the asceticism of Lonoff ’s artistry, the young Zuckerman signed on to the noble calling: “Purity...

...Tw enty-three-year-old Zuckerman has now become the famously reclusive writer he once stood in awe of, having retreated to the same isolated western Massachusetts landscape Lonoff chose to coax his art into being...

...As so often in the past, desire is rapidly transmogrified into obsession...

...It is hardly accidental that its opening chapter bears the title “The Present Moment...

...Although one might get away from the self—particularly with the help of a handy fictional double—the demands of the body are inescapable, Roth suggests here...

...It’s our humanity...

...But Roth is in fact subtly reprising the themes of the later “political” novels, like American Pastoral and The Human Stain, in Exit Ghost...

...Lonoff...

...The impulse to be in it and of it I had long since killed...

...Noble callings are expensive, Exit Ghost posits...

...That’s my life,” Lonoff declares in The Ghost Writer, “I write a sentence and then I turn it around...

...he has coexisted with various iterations of himself—and his creator—keeping company with a character named Philip Roth, and performing the tasks of narrator and observer as well as actor...

...Exit Ghost also returns to the story and characters introduced in The Ghost Writer—but takes them up years later...

...I’d hardly been off my rural mountain road in the Berkshires in those 11 years,” Zuckerman tells us at the beginning of the novel, adding that he “had rarely looked at a newspaper or listened to the news since 9/11 . . . I had ceased to inhabit not just the great world but the present moment...

...Impulsively buying a copy of the “Special Election Issue” of the New Yo rk Review of Books (which he has not read since leaving the city), he answers an ad offering to swap a West Side apartment for a rural retreat...

...He has been unbound then bound again...

...PAST 70 NOW, the Zuckerman we meet in Exit Ghost is growing forgetful and, as a result of prostate surgery, also suffers from impotence and incontinence...

...contributor, New York “Times Book Review,” “TLS” Philip Roth has killed off Nathan Zuckerman before...

...Then I look at it and I turn it around again...

...There are a few more twists of plot in Exit Ghost, including a humiliating grapple with a would-be biographer stalking the dead Lonoff, but for the most part nothing much else happens...

...Zuckerman subsequently “dies” in the highly postmodernist metafiction The Counterlife (1986), but emerges phoenixlike to preside over an examination of ’60s radicalism in American Pastoral (1997), ’50s McCarthyism in I Married a Communist (1998), and the long sweep of political correctness that began to dominate much of our cultural “discourse” beginning in the ’70s with the magnif icently complex and moving novel The Human Stain (2000...