Shane asked me the other day whether there was any good fiction about being a writer, typically the refuge of the novelist who’s been sitting in a room on his own for too long. The only thing I could think of was Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman series of novels, of which this is the first. Roth has said that his most recent novel, Exit Ghost, which I read last year and liked, is the last of the series.
In The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman is starting out on his literary career, having published only four short stories. The novel (novella?) covers a visit Zuckerman makes to his literary idol, E.I. Lonoff. As always with Roth it is beautifully written, and laden with references, jokes and allusions, seeming to bear that weight with supreme ease.
Lonoff is having an affair, which Nathan eavesdrops on through a ceiling, with a beautiful ex-student of his, Amy Bellette, who is cataloguing Lonoff’s many chaotic manuscripts. Zuckerman is struck by her at once and indulges in a string of fantasies involving her that include marriage and children. Although readers wouldn’t have known this as they read it when it was published, we know from the rest of the series that Nathan only sees Amy again many years later in a hospital, when she’s gravely ill, and no romance of any kind ensues.
But the most remarkable sequence of the book is where Roth-as-Zuckerman weaves a story that convinces the reader, momentarily, that Amy is in fact Anne Frank, living in the US incognito having survived Bergen-Belsen (in fact Anne Frank died there of typhus). This is Roth’s theme: look what fiction can do, to what uses it can be put. He’s playing with us: how much of Zuckerman is Roth? He knows that we will ask that question; it’s unavoidable today, in the world of celebrity authors. He’s constantly at pains to describe how little a writer does other than write, and yet he weaves a fascinating narrative out of it. Here, he’s written a novel about a novelist imagining a private fiction.
It’s a brilliant game, and one that I imagine the dedicatee, Milan Kundera, appreciated, fond as he is of ‘appearing’ in his own novels. Anyone who’s read Ian McEwan’s Atonement will recognise the themes of fiction and its power in the real world, but Roth executes them with such subtlety and humour (something that McEwan entirely lacks) that there is absolutely no resemblance between the books.
Philip Roth is a master. How long is going to take for the Nobel committee to recognise it?
Possibly related posts: