Inspiring Older Readers
posted on 17 Feb 2025
Rereading Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost
Back in 2018 I was catching up on a lot of Philip Roth fiction that I had missed out or previously skimped on. I reread some of his biggest and most ambitious novels and came back to the sequence of dark, intense shorter works of his late career, published in the years immediately leading up to his last book, Nemesis, published in 2012.
Throughout his writing career Roth used alter egos in his fiction – Nathan Zuckerman, Peter Tarnopol, even sometimes a Philip Roth (although he often proved to be Roth’s most unreliable narrator and it sometimes seemed that the less mediated and the more direct his fiction appeared to be, the greater the sleight of hand being exercised).
Anyway, one of his books that I had dismissed perhaps even before finishing it was his 2007 novel Exit Ghost, the book in which Roth said goodbye to Nathan Zuckerman, his most persistent alter ego and a character who featured in Roth’s novels for almost thirty years.
I wrote about rereading Roth’s Zuckerman novels here and you can probably gather from that review that at the best of times I find them very variable in quality, ranging from the great to the unreadable. I’m afraid that the reason I had wiped Exit Ghost from my mind is because it falls into the latter category.
The first thing to say about Exit Ghost is that it does require some familiarity with the preceding Zuckerman novels, for we are plunged straight into Zuckerman’s old obsessions – writing and the conditions writing requires (time, energy, focus, solitude), Jewishness, the Holocaust, his hero E.I. Lonoff, the (invented) American-Jewish short story writer whom he reveres and in his youth once met, and sex (‘erotic furies’ is probably more accurate – which is what Roth himself says he has often been ‘pursued by’). Little allowance is made for anyone who hasn’t followed Zuckerman thus far.
But this is a diminished and struggling Zuckerman, still adjusting to the physical and psychological after-effects of prostate cancer surgery and the impotence and incontinence this has caused. It is post-9/11 (the novel opens in 2004) and Zuckerman has left the rural retreat in the Berkshires where he lives (because that is where Lonoff lived) and for the first time in over a decade is back in Manhattan where he has a hospital appointment for a procedure that may help reduce his incontinence.
Roth has never flinched in looking mortality, illness and decay in the face – especially in these late-career novels – and Exit Ghost is dark and sometimes gruelling stuff. Zuckerman’s bitter black humour is also there, but over all this grim, unrelenting unravelling-of-Zuckerman is uncomfortable rather than funny and I felt it seemed longer than its just 300-pages.
One of the things that I think makes Exit Ghost an unsatisfactory read is its inclusion of Zuckerman’s lengthy invented dialogues with other characters over whom he obsesses. I found these sections tedious in themselves, but they also disrupt the flow of the novel. This is a shame because elsewhere it contains some marvellous passages – although I will say that these shine despite being in a Zuckerman novel rather than because they are. For instance, I’m always astonished that Roth is so immersed in the creative act that even what his characters read is significant (of course it is!), and so we find Zuckerman reflecting on Conrad, Bashevis Singer, Hemingway and Hawthorne in fascinating asides. There is also a lovely tribute to George Plimpton, the patrician essayist, sports-writer and editor of The Paris Review, whom Zuckerman identifies as the pre-eminent ‘participatory journalist’ of the mid-twentieth century, before acknowledging, after some consideration, that it was in fact ‘another George’ – George Orwell – who was really that century’s first and greatest ‘participatory journalist’. I imagine that Roth could do this kind of thing virtually in his sleep, but it adds an additional layer of enjoyment to a book that frankly needs all the help it can get in the enjoyment department.
If at any time you’re embarking on Roth’s late-career novels – and to my mind some of them are amongst his greatest work – then don’t do what I now realise I did, which was read this particular one and then because of it avoid the others. Yes, Exit Ghost misfires and I think The Dying Animal and The Humbling do too, but even allowing for this Philip Roth wrote more fine, high-octane novels in his final ten years than many writers manage in a lifetime and if his work appeals to you then it would be great shame to miss them – as I almost did.
Alun Severn
February 2025
Philip Roth elsewhere on Letterpress:
Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth
Rereading Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint
Rereading Philip Roth’s Zuckerman books