Exit Ghost is the last of Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman series. Here, he returns to New York City, in true Roth style, for an operation that he hopes will relieve his incontinence after an earlier prostate operation. In the course of his stay in the city, which he hasn’t set foot in for years, he unexpectedly also meets a married and much younger woman who he lusts after. He writes ever more feverish and exaggerated dialogues between them in which he says everything he can’t say in person, an she says everything that he hopes she would say. But, of course, his obsession remains unrequited.
This is a novel of coincidences, and of Zuckerman’s past re-entering his life. Roth has been fairly harshly criticised for the ‘implausibility’ of the coincidences, but I really can’t understand why. It’s a novel for heaven’s sake, and a novelist can do what he likes. Are we saying that novels now have to contain stories that could actually happen? I’ve never heard anything so silly in my life. If Roth wants to weave a story around elements of his protagonist’s earlier life, throw in coincidences and anything else he wants, why shouldn’t he?
It is a great pleasure to read Roth; his prose is luminescent, never dense, perfectly crafted. He invests every word with meaning, with weight. Zuckerman is world-weary, and surprised to be visited by his lust for a sexy young women. I found this plot line particularly poignant. Are we really supposed to assume that once a man reaches a certain age that his sexual function just turns itself off altogether as critics seem to be suggesting? Roth is filthy, delightfully so, as only he can be. How can we not sympathise with Zuckerman’s loss of youth and sexual potency?
More tiresome than the stupid criticisms of the plot or the sexual content, and I bet Roth gets a thrill out still being able to transgress after all this time, is the critics’ obsession with reading Roth into Zuckerman, as if Roth is really trying to write a sly autobiography. Roth is a writer, Zuckerman is a writer. Is it any wonder that there are similarities between them? Why is it so difficult to just accept that fiction is fiction these days?
Philip Roth is a fascinating writer, and it seems to me that every word he writes is worth reading. Exit Ghost is perhaps not his greatest novel (I haven’t read enough of them to be able to judge for myself), but it’s one of the best books published this year to my mind. I’d recommend it to any lover of great contemporary writing.
Possibly related posts:
Trackbacks
One Trackback