It’s not much fun being the central figure in a book by Philip Roth nowadays. Before expiring from a heart attack on the last page, the unnamed hero of Everyman (2006) had a hernia op, went down with a burst appendix and was hospitalised seven times, during which six stents were fitted into his clogged arteries and a defibrillator embedded in his chest. Though David Kepesh in The Dying Animal (2001) stayed reasonably hale, his lover developed breast cancer and his best friend was wiped out by a stroke. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s alter ego in nine books now, has been subject to particularly punishing ailments: an excruciating back injury that forced him to spend much of one novel spread-eagled on an orthopaedic mat, a quintuple bypass, botched surgery on a bad knee, dependence on painkillers that gave him paranoid delusions, and a prostate operation that left him impotent and incontinent.

His attempt to alleviate the latter infirmity is the starting point of Exit Ghost. Hearing of a remedial procedure in which collagen gel is injected into the bladder, he leaves the isolated retreat in the Berkshires where he has lived as a recluse for 11 years and returns to Manhattan. Predictably, the surgery fails. But it has an unexpected side effect. Confronted with the contemporary world he has long shunned, Zuckerman decides to house-swap his New England bolthole for the Upper West Side apartment of a couple eager to escape New York. That he should choose to do so might seem surprising, for irritants of the kind he has previously gone to drastic lengths to avoid (crowds, media hysteria, lack of privacy, crass commercialism) seethe everywhere in the streets around him.

What attracts him back to Manhattan, it emerges, is a combination of two things. An alluring young woman, cutely named Jamie, awakens fantasies of sexual rejuvenation, and a bullish young man, curtly called Kliman, arouses dormant instincts of male competitiveness. Provoked by both of them, the 71-year-old Zuckerman determinesto reimmerse himself vigorously in the here and now. The result, alas, is the feeblest fiction Roth has written for a long time. Never remotely believable as individuals, Jamie and Kliman merely represent the enticingly nubile and the enragingly virile. With her “languid” sexiness and pricey outfits (“her wide-necked thousand-buck cardigan sweater hanging loose over a low-cut camisole” etc), she in particular is low on credibility. “My me-ness is his magnetic pole,” she solemnly declares about her husband. “His praise for my silhouette is unstinting when I’m back-lit in the bedroom.”

Cultural cross-reference profusely embellishes Roth’s fable about the frustrations of age (memory loss now adds to Zuckerman’s burdens). Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs pours its ravishing melancholy from a CD player. TS Eliot’s bitter lines about “the gifts reserved for age” are cited. Conrad’s novella about crossing from one phase of life to another, The Shadow-Line, is repeatedly alluded to. Ibsen’s The Master Builder, with its elderly man disastrously smitten by a young woman, receives pointed mention.

None of this manages to hoist Exit Ghost itself into imaginative engagement with old age. The reappearance of a beautiful, bright girl from Roth’s first Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer (1979), as a wizened crone scarred from surgery that has removed half her brain topples the book’s central theme into macabre overkill. Around it, concerns that Roth has dealt with far more excitingly elsewhere – Jewishness, relations between actuality and fiction – are torpidly revisited. Not much more than a sprawl of slack contrivance, the narrative meanders crankily around so that bugbears can be lambasted: the sloppy use of “hopefully”, the iniquities of biographical intrusiveness as exemplified by Kliman’s plan to make his name by defaming a writer who is Zuckerman’s literary idol. An eight-page tribute to the dead sportswriter George Plimpton reads like an unused obituary clumsily pushed in. Zuckerman has often served Roth well in the past, featuring in many of his finest novels – The Counterlife (1987), American Pastoral (1997), The Human Stain (2000). On the evidence of Exit Ghost, it is now time to lay him to rest.

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