Vol. 1, Iss. 1Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth What happens when America’s most phallocentric novelist destroys his protagonist’s penis? He writes a bad book. It is almost incredible that the very man who penned Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy’s Complaint and American Pastoral, among other gems, could produce the tired, stale prose in Exit Ghost. Ironically, Philip Roth reminds us of his own mortality as an author while striving to capture the aging and decay of his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, now 71 and a novelist himself. In the ninth and final book of the Zuckerman series, which has spanned the most prolific twenty-eight years of Roth’s career, we encounter neither the uproarious and painfully honest author of Portnoy nor the discerning and caustic creator of American Pastoral. We are confronted, instead, with a brilliant writer groping to save a novel that just doesn’t quite work. Perhaps Roth sensed this problem, for his alter ego debates whether to publish an obviously flawed final book (à la Faulkner), or to “put the manuscript aside” (à la Hemingway). Or perhaps he actually meant to guard against too much personal association with Zuckerman, for the protagonist vociferously defends the staunch line dividing fiction from reality. Regardless, Roth’s final product—despite a few very impressive elements redolent of his previous masterpieces—is almost as disjointed as Zuckerman’s description of his own book: “Permanent groping is what it is now, a groping that goes well beyond the anxious groping for fluency that writing is to begin with.”In the first chapter, entitled “The Present Moment,” Zuckerman writes, “Here and Now. Then and Now. The Beginning of the End of Now.” Nearly three decades later, Exit Ghost is the “Now” to the “Then” of The Ghost Writer, the upstart Zuckerman novella in which Roth’s 23-year old alter ego embarks upon his literary career. In The Ghost Writer, the young Zuckerman goes on a pilgrimage to the remote Berkshire home of his literary idol, a fictitious author named E.I. Lonoff—purportedly America’s master of the short story—whose works have fallen into oblivion by the time of Exit Ghost. The fledgling author discovers Lonoff’s life to be as ascetic as his writing; he learns that the price of his idol’s craft is profound alienation from mankind and the consequent destruction of his marriage.Exit Ghost begins with the 71-year old Zuckerman, himself now America’s most renowned author, traveling from “the rural mountain road” of his Berkshire abode to New York for the first time in eleven years. He has returned not to reconnect with mankind, and not to gather fodder for a new book, but rather—wait for it—“to see a urologist at Mount Sinai Hospital.” But the tone of this wonderfully prosaic opening gambit soon becomes tedious. Roth is in his element with black and satirical humor (Portnoy’s Complaint says it all); the somber prose of a J.M. Coetzee or Cormac McCarthy seems like a foreign language to him. Richard Russo does in Straight Man, with a similar protagonist and subject matter, what Roth could have done if he had stuck with his usual grim humor in Exit Ghost. Zuckerman’s description of his daily diaper-changing routine is promising stylistically, but it is followed by a monotonous account of a typical old hermit’s life: he lives in isolation, he is out of touch with technology—“I continued to live in the Age of the Typewriter and have no idea what the World Wide Web is”— and he is apathetic toward current events. Like his dead idol, Zuckerman has spent eleven years reading, writing, listening to music, and spending time with Nature (and his impotent, incontinent self). This flirtation with eloquence and subsequent retreat to tedium pervades Exit Ghost. Roth has spells of brilliance, caustic wit, and poignancy. Sadly, these are but fleeting stops along the way of a trite and tiresome journey.It is surprising that Roth would try to vivify such a hackneyed, stereotypical character as the novelist pounding away at his typewriter in his wooded haven. And it gets worse: Zuckerman is very much the proverbial cranky old man. He gripes, repeatedly, about the ubiquity of cell phones; he corrects grammar; he loathes vigorous young men. Admittedly his analysis on the infiltration of technology is rather eloquent—“that the immense loneliness of human beings should produce this boundless longing to be heard, and the accompanying disregard for being overheard”—but Roth’s septuagenarian alter ego is far from the first old codger to make this observation. He even admits: “I knew…I was at one with all the cranks who imagined…that the machine was the enemy of life.” And yet he continues to harp on technology at several other points in the novel, as if he forgot to delete a few passages from an earlier draft.Zuckerman’s intended short-term trip to New York for bladder surgery quickly becomes complicated. After bitterly discovering that his collagen injection has failed—“‘A fucking dream,’ by which I meant the dream of being suddenly like everyone else”—the old man who has “long since killed the impulse to be in the present moment” yields to that very urge. He decides on a whim to exchange houses with a “reliable writing couple in [their] early thirties” from Manhattan’s Upper West Side whose apartment-swap listing he (a little too coincidentally) reads upon opening a newspaper for the first time in a decade. Unbeknownst to Zuckerman, he then walks into a web of relationships that quickly shatters the wall of solitude he has been constructing for eleven years.First and foremost on his list of problems is the woman of the apartment, Jamie Logan, a budding writer five years out of Harvard with a big brain and bigger breasts. Zuckerman thought himself beyond possible arousal—“I hadn’t sat so close to such an irresistible young woman in years…she had a huge pull on me, a huge gravitational pull on the ghost of my desire”—but he becomes transfixed by Jamie’s vitality and confident sexuality.Five scenes from a play Zuckerman is casually writing, “He and She”—title borrowed from Chekov—are scattered throughout the novel. These scenes contain some of the worst writing of Roth’s career. In one of the few humorous sections, Zuckerman admits to Jamie his sexual infatuation:SHE: What will impress you?HE: Your breasts impress me.SHE: Tell me something I don’t know.The evolving drama—half fiction, half fiction within fiction—between Zuckerman and Jamie is never plausible. At its best, the dialogue is effectively uncomfortable. Usually it’s just awkward. Roth is certainly not the first to attempt to capture the sexual dynamic between older men and younger women. One of his literary influences, Saul Bellow, brilliantly depicts the sexuality of older men in Herzog (which Roth seems to subtly reference: “Otherwise, I told myself, you’ll become the exemplary letter-to-the-editor madman). And compared to a contemporary master, J.M Coetzee, who adeptly portrays illicit sexual relations in Disgrace and Waiting for the Barbarians, Roth’s prose in Exit Ghost sometimes seems utterly juvenile. A few lines are hilariously bad, and one wonders if Roth intended them so:Scene II.HE: Do your breasts give you confidence? SHE: Yes.HE: Tell me about that.Scene III. HE: How stupidly of me.SHE: Yes, (laughs) how stupid of you.HE: I guess I’m afraid of you. SHE: (Long pause): I’m a little afraid of you.Scene III.SHE: Say why it kills you.HE: Because I’m crazy about you.SHE: Well…I just wanted to hear it.”HE: You misuse “hopefully.”SHE: (She laughs. Shyly—to his surprise—she asks) Am I? Do I?After Zuckerman then explains her linguistic error, SHE says, “Don’t do that. You did it yesterday. Don’t do it again.”From shy and flirtatious to bold and admonishing in three lines? There’s a reason Roth is a novelist, not a playwright. The five dispersed scenes are certainly not a display of his writing prowess. They do, however, effectively blur the distinction between the real and the unreal. In this vein, Roth writes in one of his best passages, “Isn’t one’s pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.”Zuckerman indulges his sexual fantasies through fiction because the reality of his impotence is too cruel to face. As long as he avoids the play format, Roth still frequently strikes gold. He writes, “I set out to minimize [the impotence] by struggling to pretend that desire had naturally abated, until I came into contact for barely an hour with a beautiful, privileged, intelligent, self-possessed, languid-looking thirty-year old girl…and I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again.”The second obstacle to Zuckerman’s departure from New York is Richard Kliman, a friend and ex-lover of Jamie Logan, fresh from Harvard and brimming with self-confidence. Kliman is particularly insufferable to the impotent, incontinent Zuckerman because he represents youthful manhood and virility. Kliman soon becomes the old man’s nemesis, for he intends to write an exposé-biography of Zuckerman’s literary hero which would reveal E.I. Lonoff’s “great secret.” (“I assume the great secret is sexual,” Zuckerman says. “That’s very astute of you,” Kliman responds dryly.) When confronted with the young man’s seemingly indomitable will, Zuckerman writes, “There it was: the tactless severity of vital male youth, not a single doubt about his coherence, blind with self-confidence and the virtue of knowing what matters most. The ruthless sense of necessity. The annihilating impulse in the face of an obstacle. Those grand grandstand days when you shrink from nothing…Everything is a target; you’re on the attack; and you, and you alone, are right.” Kliman, too, flashes some wisdom about intergenerational tension: “Look, old men hate young men. That goes without saying.”But even the relationship between Zuckerman and Kliman, which constitutes some of the best writing in the book, often morphs into absurdity.In one scene, Zuckerman tells the young firebrand that he will do everything in his power to prevent the publication of the subversive biography. Zuckerman calls on himself to “Let the intensity out! Let the belligerence out! It’s all called back—the virile man called back to life! Only there is no virility. There is only the brevity of expectations … in taking on the young and courting all the dangers of someone of this age intermingling too closely with someone of that age, I can only end up bloodied.” But as if to intentionally spoil the eloquence of these lines, Kliman’s response is utterly ludicrous: “You stink…you smell bad! Crawl back into your hole and die! You’re dying old man, you’ll soon be dead! You smell of decay! You smell of death!” Is this a joke? If so, it is neither funny nor appropriate. If not, it is wholly implausible. Many neighboring passages in Exit Ghost could easily have been written by two different authors, as if Roth wanted Zuckerman to oscillate between lucidity and senility in his very narration. Whatever his intent, it does not work. If anything, he merely soils those surprisingly few passages that contain the eloquence and insight the author’s faithful audience has come to expect.Almost as frustrating as Roth’s constant flux between beautiful clarity and exasperating absurdity are his myriad digressions. One section about Bush’s reelection in 2004 is particularly unbearable. Yes, Bush won. Yes, Democrats (and most New Yorkers) were rather depressed. That was three years ago. The trite diatribes against Bush and the Republican Party are both ineloquent and distracting. Even worse is a twenty-one page digression about George Plimpton, inserted inexplicably at a crucial moment in the plot. This is akin to a twenty-three year old F. Scott Fitzgerald pedantically including sundry school essays and unrelated plays in This Side of Paradise. But could America’s most heavily decorated living author really have made such an amateur mistake? There seems to be no other explanation. In fact, Roth’s incessant literary allusions (especially pervasive in Exit Ghost) seem to corroborate the view that he used all the tools at his disposal to clothe an essentially mediocre novel in impressive garments. He alludes, implicitly or explicitly, to Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Keats, Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, Tolstoy, Chekov, Dostoevsky, Irving, Conrad, Hardy, both Brontë sisters, and a slew of other authors, as if to enrich an impoverished book by referencing better ones. The end result is a fragmented novel, assembled from many parts but never crystallizing into a coherent whole.Exit Ghost is a rather unsatisfying conclusion to the spectacular nine-book Zuckerman series. Given the author’s proven ability, his latest work naturally has some redemptive moments. It is well worth the read for those few passages where Roth lives up to his potential, and for its historical import in the oeuvre of this brilliant writer. The title seems to be taken from a Shakespearean stage direction. And so, while it is perhaps time for Nathan Zuckerman to feebly exit the stage after a magnificent twenty-eight year show, one can only hope Philip Roth will delve into the theater of his genius and wow the audience once more.