Philip Roth
EXIT GHOST
292pp. Cape. £16.99.
978 0 224 08173 3
One of the most famous passages in Philip Roth’s later fiction is Nathan
Zuckerman’s meditation, in American Pastoral (1997), on the fallibilities
that make us kin: “The fact remains that getting people right is not what
living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting
them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful consideration, getting
them wrong again. That’s how we know we’re alive: we’re wrong”. Ten years
on, that awkward conviction still nags away at the ageing fictional writer’s
consciousness, even in its offstage peripheries; within the first ten pages
of Exit Ghost, Zuckerman is recalling the life and death of Larry Hollis,
one of his neighbours during his self-imposed exile up in the Berkshires:
An only child, Larry was sent to live with relatives on the Naugatuck River
southwest of Hartford, just outside bleak, industrial Waterbury,
Connecticut, and, there, in a boy’s diary of “Things to Do,” he laid out a
future for himself that he followed to the letter for the rest of his life;
from then on, everything undertaken was deliberately causal.
With that list of “Things to Do”, Hollis not only glances back (unwittingly)
to James Gatz’s programmatic transformation into Jay Gatsby in F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s novel, but also joins a series of figures with more personal
resonances for Zuckerman, like Swede Levov in American Pastoral, and Coleman
Silk in The Human Stain (2000): men who have tried to plot out and fashion a
“deliberately causal” life and identity for themselves according to their
own specifications. Hollis goes further in “the utterly conventional
structure he’d made of his life”, timing his own death to save his family
the inconvenience of a long illness, even thinking to send Zuckerman a
consolatory note before taking his overdose of sleeping pills.
However, despite the narrator’s claim that “he had, amazingly, achieved every
last goal that he had imagined for himself”, Hollis belongs most truly in
the company of Levov and Silk in his failure completely to control his plot:
for all his achievements, there remains one item on the list that he never
managed (“He had wanted to be the father of one boy and one girl, and only
after the fourth girl was born did Marylynne refuse him”). In the light of
Exit Ghost as a whole, it is not an insignificant failure, highlighting both
the novel’s recurrent concern with forebears and families – notably,
Zuckerman’s absent literary father, E. I. Lonoff – and that larger
exploration, which runs throughout Roth’s recent fiction, of what plots and
narratives can and cannot do in the face of experience. At once a coda to
and a retrospective deepening of the Zuckerman Bound and American Pastoral
sequences, Exit Ghost also brings into clear focus a painful fact that may
have passed unnoticed in the background of the last three Zuckerman novels:
that if Zuckerman has plotted his later life with a novelist’s control, he
has only succeeded in his plan by plotting himself out of active life
altogether. And how will that willed exile survive re-entry into the world
he left behind, the contingencies of body and time, “the present moment . .
. in it and of it”?
It is precisely at this point of re-entry into the spaces of the past that
Exit Ghost begins: it is 2004, eleven years after Zuckerman fled New York,
its attendant traps of fame and public misunderstanding, and as Roth
punningly put it at the end of The Anatomy Lesson (1983), “the corpus that
was his”. But the ageing of that “corpus” will not let him stay away for
good: the prostate operation which rendered him impotent (alluded to
frequently in The Human Stain) has also made him incontinent, and he is back
in the city for an operation he hopes might offer him an escape from “the
special under-garments and changing the pads and dealing with the
‘accidents’”. He initially imagines that his surgical procedure might be
able to be carried out like a surgical strike – a quick trip back to the
scenes of his old fame and infamy (where schoolchildren on buses once
confused him with his own fictional anti-hero Carnovsky), followed by an
escape back to the Berkshires. Roth’s narrative has other ideas, and
Zuckerman soon discovers how porous his barriers against the old life in
“the present moment” truly are:
In the country there was nothing tempting my hope. I had made peace with my
hope. But when I came to New York, in only hours New York did what it does
to people – awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.
“Hope breaks out”: Roth’s juxtaposition of blessing and contagion is fitting,
given the speed with which past moments break into Zuckerman’s life. First,
a chance overhearing in hospital leads him to rediscover Amy Bellette, the
refugee from the Holocaust whom he met, so briefly and influentially, at
Lonoff’s house in his mid-1950s youth, as recorded in The Ghost Writer
(1979), and who is now dying in poverty in New York. Next, as he sits in one
of his old haunts the night before he intends to go home, an advertisement
prompts the thought of a temporary house-swap with Jamie Logan and Billy
Davidoff, a young, liberal husband and wife keen to get away from New York
because of Jamie’s fear of terrorism. Finally, with the inevitability of the
best (and worst) melodramas, one of Jamie’s old college boyfriends turns out
to be Richard Kliman, a biographer trying to make his name. Kliman is as
strenuous in discovering E. I. Lonoff’s repressed personal secrets as
Zuckerman is protective of the long-dead novelist’s faded literary
reputation. All very convenient, perhaps, on the surface, all too
convenient; but, as Zuckerman noted in American Pastoral, “history, in fact,
is a very sudden thing”, and this novel suggests that the cocoon which
surrounded Zuckerman in the stories of the 1990s trilogy might itself have
been a delicate thing, just waiting to collapse on his return to his old
territory. Certainly, in an alarmingly short time, the relative insulation
of a life lived at one remove from life has given way to “the bitter
helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again”, as Zuckerman
finds himself falling, truly hopelessly, for Jamie, while the mystery of
Lonoff’s biographical secrets forces him to re-evaluate the roots of his own
creative life: “Precipitously stepping into a new future, I had retreated
unwittingly into the past – a retrograde trajectory not that uncommon, but
uncanny anyhow”.
Not that Zuckerman is the only one who needs to reread and reconsider: as its
title suggests, Exit Ghost lives in a strongly allusive relationship with
the Zuckerman Bound sequence, particularly The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman
Unbound – indeed, no Roth novel since The Prague Orgy (1985) has leant so
heavily on earlier works, by Roth and by his predecessors. While Zuckerman
revisits the physical scenes of his old New York life, Roth’s narrative
replays scenes from the earlier novels, notably those depicting the young
Amy Bellette’s disruption of the Lonoffs’ marriage; and, as Zuckerman once
concocted the fantasy of Amy as Anne Frank miraculously escaping to an
incognito life in America, he now distils his ideal conversations with Jamie
into a series of fictional dramatic dialogues entitled He and She:
HE What might that larger reason be?
SHE Escaping pain.
HE What pain?
SHE The pain of being present.
In the hands of a lesser writer, this might work simply as creative recycling;
but, as befits a novel about generations and successions, Exit Ghost makes
more searching use of the numerous squarings-up of old and new versions that
take place as the plot unfolds. Indeed, that plot is itself an allusive
squaring-up: with its long-lost literary manuscript in the hands of a
writer’s ageing lover, and its disquisitions on the ethics and proprieties
of literary biography, the novel’s debt to Henry James’s The Aspern Papers
is palpable, and it is the intrigue about the manuscript of Lonoff’s lost
novel around which so much of this story revolves. The resonances of the
idea of the “ghost writer” in the first Zuckerman novel were complex ones,
in that the phrase could refer both to Zuckerman’s role as dreamer of the
non-existent, and to Lonoff’s perceived (or imagined) ability to sublimate
himself into the rigorous impartiality of his fiction. As time went on, it
would have become clear to readers of the American Pastoral trilogy that, in
his self-imposed exile to Lonoff’s territory, Zuckerman’s life was likewise
echoing that retreat from experience into fictional creation. Now, however,
it becomes ominously clear to him that Lonoff’s biographical elusiveness may
have had altogether different sources, as Amy finally admits to him:
So there was the subject of the novel he couldn’t write and the reason he
couldn’t write it and why he said he could never publish it. So long as he
was married to Hope, Amy told me, he never mentioned to anyone having had a
sister, let alone written a word about their illicit adolescent lust. After
they were discovered together by a family friend and the scandal was
revealed to their Roxbury neighbors, Frieda was spirited away by their
parents to begin life anew with them in the morally pure atmosphere of
pioneering Zionist Palestine.
Not only does Zuckerman have to rethink his own literary “parentage”, but he
has to face the unpalatable fact that in his unshakeable self-belief and
pigheaded determination to find and publish Lonoff’s guilty secret, Kliman
resembles a parodic younger counterpart to Zuckerman himself (“It was,
unexpectedly, a passing rendition of me at about that stage, as though
Kliman were mimicking (or, as now seemed more to the point, deliberately
mocking) my mode of forging ahead when I started out”). Both inside and
outside his fictional writing, Roth has made no secret of his contempt for
reductively biographical readings of imaginative fiction: for the Jake
Balokowskys of this world, always seeking the roots of creativity in some
traumatic fact. “You don’t create the aura of intimacy by dropping your
pants in public”, he remarked drily in a 1981 interview; “do that and most
people will instinctively look away.” For its part, Exit Ghost features some
of Roth’s most elegantly barbed depictions of, and broadsides against,
biographical possessiveness, from Amy’s impassioned letter to the press
(“Without the least idea of what is innately transgressive about the
literary imagination, cultural journalism is ever mindful of phony ethical
issues”) to Zuckerman’s complaint to Jamie about Kliman (“There’s the not-so
that reveals the so – that’s fiction; and then there’s the not-so that just
isn’t so – that’s Kliman”).
Stylistically, Exit Ghost is something of a surprise: a reader acclimatized to
the progressive sidelining of Zuckerman’s own life during the American
Pastoral trilogy might take some time to get used to his newly rediscovered
centrality – almost as if Joseph Conrad had followed Chance with a
picaresque first-person narrative entitled The Adventures of Marlow. Nor is
it a flawless work: for example, Zuckerman’s encomium on George Plimpton
feels like an insufficiently fictionalized valedictory address; and for all
Roth’s deliberate highlighting of “the theatrical emotions that the horrors
of politics inspire”, Jamie and Billy’s growing despair as the 2004
presidential election results emerge (“The turn to the right in this country
is a movement to replace political institutions with morality”) is rather a
stolid and undramatized performance compared to the rage of Merry Levov in
American Pastoral or Herman Roth in The Plot Against America (2004). But
this is not where the novel’s interest truly lies; in fact, one passage near
the beginning hints at this:
I started toward the subway to take a train downtown to Ground Zero. Begin
there, where the biggest thing of all occurred . . . . I never made it to
the subway . . . . Instead, after crossing the park, I found myself in the
familiar rooms of the Metropolitan Museum.
One might read that change of direction as Roth’s resistance to the easier
historical associations attendant on a post-2001 New York fiction: Exit
Ghost’s focus is more on the smaller physical and emotional scarrings that
are part of the publicly brutalized landscape. And if much of the novel
plays old against new, with the present recapitulating the past, Zuckerman’s
story highlights that terrible form of self-reference around which so much
of Roth’s recent work has circled: the fact that ageing lampoons us all,
makes us grotesque bodily parodies of ourselves. Where the Zuckerman of the
early novels could be prodigal with his semen, now he just leaks urine, and
the dignity of Roth’s writing, recalling the hard-headedness of his memoir
Patrimony (1991), lies in his not sparing Zuckerman the indignity. The sound
of time in late Roth is not that of a winged chariot but of a hospital
trolley with badly greased wheels; and there are few American writers who
write with such power of the loss of powers, with such command of the chaos
that haunts and mocks every attempt at shape. Roth has one final indignity
in store for Zuckerman: Amy’s brain cancer is killing her, and a reader
eventually finds out that Zuckerman’s memory (the part into which so much of
his being retreated during the American Pastoral trilogy) has begun to fail
him, a revelation which lends a retrospective poignancy to some of the
novel’s earlier moments (“I’d copied the phone number onto a piece of scrap
paper on which I’d written the name ‘Amy Bellette’”).
In these circumstances, it is perhaps only fitting that Exit Ghost should end
with Zuckerman giving up New York as a bad job and running back to the
Berkshires (“All that happened is that things almost happened, yet I
returned as though from some massive happening”), although, given that this
is presumably Zuckerman’s final testimony, some readers might wish for
something a bit more “consummate”. But Roth’s later fiction has often fought
shy of the consolations of denouement, of resolving into major-key finales:
American Pastoral ended with an angry rhetorical question (“What on earth is
less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?”) and the final four words
of The Plot Against America were “I was the prosthesis”. If Roth is going to
grant us these comforts, he wants us to know how prosthetic they often are.
“Gone for good” are Zuckerman’s last words here, but they exist in the
imaginary space of He and She; Roth lets them stand, but what also stands is
the ghostly testament of E. I. Lonoff:
Then one morning he spoke. He had been unconscious all the day before. He
said, “The end is so immense, it is its own poetry. It requires little
rhetoric. Just state it plainly.”
Bharat Tandon teaches at St Anne’s College, Oxford. His book Jane
Austen and the Morality of Conversation was published in 2003.
