Nathan Zuckerman, star of nine (or ten, depending) of Philip Roth’s novels, is out of hibernation. He’s come down to New York the week of the Bush/Kerry election to get some cartilidge inserted into his malfunctioning penis. While here he gets harassed by his past, tries to harass others into his future and spends most of his time either baffled picking the world apart or putting it together in his head. As is the lot in life for Nathan (and all real writers, it is posited) he spends more of his time creating slightly more interesting versions of reality in his head than what is actually going on around him. Now that his head is getting clumsy and forgetful, everything that means anything to Zuckerman is just about to fall apart.
This is, we’re told, the last Zuckerman novel and that’s fine. There’s no place left for him to go except the grave and Roth has already done the death trip twice: once as an observer with Patrimony and once as a participant with Everyman.
One of the many constant themes in the Zuckerman books (and the one, I think, that Roth most likes to tease us with) is the thin line between an author’s biography and the characters he creates. Basic knowledge of Roth’s life offer up many parallels with the life of Zuckerman, and yet Zuckerman’s central focus in Exit Ghost is that a writer can and should create things purely out of imagination. And those who go searching for real life parallels are lower than whale shit. He argues this in the face of today’s memoirist-tide of young writers, personified by an obnoxious guy named Kliman (not Kil-man) who wants to “revive” and also destroy (with a scandalous rumor) Zuckerman’s idol (and star of the earlier book The Ghost Writer) E. I. Lonoff (who may or may not be based on Bernard Malamud, if you wanna go that route.)
There are wheels within wheels to the point that I figured that Roth doth protest too much and, yes, this must all just be true. Which annoyed me, because Zuckerman boldly announces that he is completely apathetic to George W. Bush. Until I found this:
