NATHAN ZUCKERMAN HAS grown old, and then some. Though Zuckerman is naturally dismayed, Philip Roth’s readers stand to be equally dismayed about this inevitability. Not because Exit Ghost is weakened by its hero’s age – it’s not – but because readers, like children, might have been relieved to imagine a Zuckerman who stayed forever in control of his circumstances.

Over time Roth has given his protagonist adventures and meta-adventures in decline, impotence and mortality, but Zuckerman has remained in some sense untouchable. He has appeared and reappeared in novels, vigorously employed by Roth as the narrator of both his own story and those of others. Ambivalence towards him comes with the territory: loathe him, recoil from his self-regard or his goatishness, admire him, envy him, do with him what you will. But once you’ve begun one of these books, generally you’re in. That remains true of Exit Ghost, the ninth and apparently the last of the Zuckerman novels.

In 1979, when Roth published The Ghost Writer, the narrator Nathan Zuckerman was a young man constructed, in part, of zeal for literature, ambition and possibilities. That novel told of the night in the 1950s that Zuckerman spent at the home of his mentor, the novelist E. I. Lonoff, and where he met Lonoff’s former student, Amy Bellette.

Here was Zuckerman at the starting gate. With Exit Ghost, gone are most vestiges of the rising literary protégé and, later, the literary star who was absorbed by carnality, world events and the seductions and betrayals of the literary life. Instead, Roth now presents an advanced version of Zuckerman, who, we are told, left the city 11 years earlier after receiving threatening letters, and has been writing in rural solitude, as Lonoff once did. At the opening of this novel, on the eve of the 2004 US election, he has returned to New York at the age of 71 to see a urologist who might be able to alleviate his embarrassing prostate-related incontinence.

Upon seeing a whole landscape of pedestrians on their cell phones, Zuckerman gawks like a Luddite from Mars: “For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous. And yet it seemed like a real tragedy, too.” Not only is the city transformed, but so is Amy, whom he chances upon in an elevator. She was exquisite in The Ghost Writer, but Amy at the age of 75 in Exit Ghost has had brain surgery, is disfigured and ill.

We know from reading Roth that, divested of her erotic power, Amy cannot remain the primary female figure here. Zuckerman, we expect, will also have an encounter with a young, attractive, not-fully-realised character – in this case, Jamie Logan, whom he meets with her husband after impulsively answering a house-swapping ad. Jamie, he tells us, “had a huge pull on me, a huge gravitational pull on the ghost of my desire”.

In his longing, Zuckerman writes a series of alternative-reality scenes from a play he calls He and She. Exit Ghost moves between Zuckerman’s actual life – in which he wears liners in his underwear – and the altogether different fluidity of his conjured life: “He: ‘Are you a seductress?’ She: ‘No, no, absolutely not.’ He: ‘You have a husband, you have a lover, and now you want to have me as a friend. Do you collect men? Or do men collect you?’ ” This feels both too casual and surprisingly awkward, perhaps serving Zuckerman’s purposes, but not the novel’s.

The action in Exit Ghost primarily involves Zuckerman’s brief interactions with Jamie and her husband and Amy; the “villain” is an aggressive young biographer, Kliman, who claims to have damaging information about Lonoff.

There are many asides and side-trips, including, early on, a moving depiction of Zuckerman’s friend Larry Hollis. “He was 68 years old when he died and, with the exception of the plan recorded in his ‘Things to Do’ diary to one day have a son named Larry Hollis Jr, he had, amazingly, achieved every last goal that he had imagined for himself when he was orphaned at ten.”

Even Larry’s fleeting presence has more resonance than Jamie’s extensive one. The ageing and the dead, when compared with this blandly nubile, young and living woman, still really do have power.

Roth has written about age and death before, recently in Everyman, but most beautifully in Patrimony, his memoir about his father. Exit Ghost is often strong but not beautiful, and can occasionally be glancingly harsh, even mean : “He: ‘I’ve heard about the boy from the Tulane tennis team who thrust his cock so far down your throat in the summer of your fourteenth year that you threw up all over him.’ ”).

Yet the novel often confidently relies on the engine of immediacy. Bleats of smart comedy burst out: “And I’d had a dream, I now remembered . . . I am on the phone to my mother. ‘Ma, can you do me a favour?’ She laughs at my naiveté. ‘Sweetheart, there’s nothing I wouldn’t do for you. What is it, darling?’ she asks. ‘Can we have incest?’ ” The reader’s dismay at Zuckerman’s ageing is activated not just by our own ageing, but also by Roth’s. Fiction audiences have often had appetites for young, audacious male writers and their attendant alter egos and mirror images. For a long time Roth has satisfied such appetites. The net effect of all that exciting, complex writing and that perpetual examination of carnality, triumph and loss is a sensation of unstoppable productivity, a quality inevitably bound up and identified with youth – specifically and exclusively, male youth.

The flaws of Exit Ghost aren’t caused by Zuckerman’s ageing, but by his improvisational foray into “making do”. The narrative gets its fitfully absorbing energy and its eloquence from his muttering, muted fury. As he tries to manage his diminishing world, he forces us not to look away.

Brain tumours, dementia and other hateful trappings of the twilight years – especially impotence and incontinence, those entwined provinces of the ever-central but now nearly ghostly penis – are all here, catalogued mournfully, obsessively, and described ferociously. Keep looking, Roth says. It only gets worse.

Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
Cape, £16.99; 292pp

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