The Rake’s Progress Giving Up The Ghost

In Philip Roth's new novel, "Exit Ghost," a neighbor of his longtime protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman—that Rothlike novelist—asks the questions all writers learn to dread. "Where do you get your ideas?" "How do you know if an idea is a good idea or a bad idea?" "How do you know when a book is finished?" "I heard a writer on television say that the characters take over the book and write it themselves. Is that true?" Naturally, these are just the questions you'd want to ask Roth himself when you sit with him in his agent's office: they boil down to What's it like in there? But luckily, he forgot to put the kibosh on this one: What are you reading these days? Roth is too polite to sigh. "I haven't been reading anybody contemporary," he says. "For the last several years, I've been rereading writers whom I haven't read since college or graduate school. I read quite a lot of Conrad last summer, and Turgenev. And the summer before that, I read a lot of Hemingway. What I'm doing is bidding adieu to the great writers."

Sooner or later, every reader begins to sense it's getting time for a last go-round with the masters. And judging by "Exit Ghost" and last year's "Everyman"—in which a nameless man in relentless decline finally dies under the knife—bidding adieu has become Roth's new fixation. Paradoxically, it's given his work yet another shot of energy. In the new novel, he bids adieu to Zuckerman himself, his fictive alter ego off and on since "The Ghost Writer" in 1979. By the way, Roth, 74, looks healthy, and is already working on a new book; he lets slip only that it has a butcher shop and a cat.

A dozen years ago, Philip Roth already had a comfortable place in America's postwar pantheon, alongside the likes of Updike, Mailer, Styron and the boys. Even his first book, the 1959 "Goodbye, Columbus," had become canonical. He'd had a scandalous best seller in "Portnoy's Complaint" (1969), whose narrator claims to be "the only person ever to ejaculate into the pocket of a baseball mitt at the Empire Burlesque house in Newark. Maybe." He'd completed the Zuckerman trilogy—"The Ghost Writer," "Zuckerman Unbound" and "The Anatomy Lesson," with its epilogue "The Prague Orgy"—newly republished by the Library of America. He'd written political satire (the Nixon-era "Our Gang"), Kafkaesque parable ("The Breast"), a baseball novel ("The Great American Novel") and much, much more. Another writer might have called it a career and settled into an endowed chair.

But since 1995, Roth has been producing a series of passionate, cantankerous, tragicomic novels—beginning with "Sabbath's Theater" and continuing through "American Pastoral," "The Human Stain" and "Everyman"—that have made him again a formidable contemporary, whose admirers include both the baldheaded and the shaven-headed. He remains a storyteller so addictive that you finish one book and reach for another. Who else has his range and depth in matters sexual, intellectual, psychological, emotional and political? And who else could play them all for laughs and still touch the heart? Bellow and Morrison have their Nobel Prizes. (So far Roth just has a Pulitzer, two National Book Awards, three PEN/Faulkners and various other awards and medals.) Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy have their partisans. But at this point, Roth is everybody's daddy.

Zuckerman, who in 1984's "The Anatomy Lesson" managed to get four different women on top of him as he lay on the floor with a bad back, has been both impotent and incontinent ever since the prostatectomy he announced in 1997's "American Pastoral." "I felt that I'd never really resolved this business of the prostatectomy and its consequences," Roth says. "And it seemed to me I should." In "Exit Ghost," Zuckerman learns of a collagen treatment that might give him "somewhat more control over my urine flow than an infant," and comes to New York after 11 years of solitary writing and rustication. The city stirs up the desires he'd suppressed—though he knows the collagen can't restore his potency. Even worse, his memory is now going: "If one morning I should pick up the page I had written the day before and find myself unable to remember writing it, what would I do? … Without my work, what would be left of me?" No wonder Roth can't imagine a further sequel: his business is with people in the world—even those about to leave it.

"Exit Ghost" is an ideal farewell—not that Zuckerman will fare well. He's lost his manhood, his control over body and mind, and the energy and aggression that once made him a literary warrior. When he confronts a young scholar—"I'm going to do everything I can to sabotage you"—he sounds like poor old Lear, railing against the daughters who've become his keepers: "I will do such things— / What they are yet I know not—but they shall be / The terrors of the earth." But is Roth sure this is Zuckerman's last go-round? "Pretty certain," he says. "Pretty certain. I mean, I arranged it that way. I meant the conclusion to be very conclusive. And I can't imagine reopening it." Does he miss Zuckerman? "No, I don't," he says. "I get more satisfaction out of seeing the thing brought to a close. I think it's the right ending."