The Rake’s Progress Giving Up The Ghost

Roth's detractors won't like "Exit Ghost" any better than his other books. Early in his career, Jewish groups called him on the carpet for defamation. ("So I thought finally, 'Well, you want it, I'll give it to you'," he said in a 1984 interview. "And out came Portnoy, apertures spurting.") After "Portnoy," he was a self-hating Jew and a pornographer, then a misogynist, then simply a bastard: the constant in these critiques is a failure to distinguish between the work and the man. Carlin Romano, writing in The Philadelphia Inquirer, begins his review of "Exit Ghost" by harking back to actress Claire Bloom's 1996 memoir of life with Roth, whom she portrays as a monster. "Bloom … remains the only person close to Roth who has defied, in print, his fierce attempts to control information about his private life," Romano writes. "She makes the point repeatedly … that while Roth reflexively savages critics … for ineptly reading his books as if they're more autobiographical than imaginative, those critics are often right … A Roth novel is evidence of the mind behind it, and observing Philip Roth's angry, self-indulgent mind gets sadder by the year." This may be Romano's inadvertent audition for a part in Roth's next book.

Before being interviewed for this story, Roth put his private life off-limits—leaving whatever ferocity to the publicist—and it's hard to see what such a discussion could have added. Since his fiction is the only reason people gossip about Roth in the first place, why does it matter what proportions of invention and recollection go into it? In any novel, even "truth" is fiction. Zuckerman is unarguably "angry and self-indulgent"—you know, unlike the rest of us—yet nobody minds those traits in King Lear. He's also desperate, sad, funny as hell, both a phallic imperialist and a fool about the women. None of this would be news to Roth, the novelist who took pains to make him so.

In "Exit Ghost," Roth beats this still-not-dead horse one more time. Amy Bellette, the ingénue of "The Ghost Writer," who's now an old woman with a brain tumor, writes an unpublished letter to The New York Times: "Your cultural journalism is tabloid gossip … What transgression has the writer committed, and not against the exigencies of literary esthetics, but against his or her daughter, son, mother, father, spouse, lover, friend, publisher or pet?" Though she doesn't say it, Amy is thinking of her only love, the neglected writer E. I. Lonoff, Zuckerman's hero. (Who's no more Bernard Malamud than Roth is Zuckerman.) When Lonoff died, he was working on a novel involving brother-sister incest; now the young scholar whom Zuckerman threatens has got hold of the manuscript and means to write a biography treating the incest as the crucial incident in Lonoff's life. The biography would revive interest in Lonoff's work—while trivializing it as mere coded confession.

What does Roth himself imagine is the "truth" about this fictive issue? Or does he care? "I should, shouldn't I?" He laughs. "I should care. The other night, I reread a little section where Zuckerman is trying to persuade Amy that Lonoff stole the incest theme from a biography of Hawthorne. And I thought, 'Did he?' Zuckerman makes this theory up, but Amy says Lonoff did commit incest with his sister. And Amy should know. But Amy's been brain-damaged. I don't know what the truth is. I think what's important is that the ambiguity is clear."

Roth doesn't mind a touch of the inexplicable. In "Exit Ghost," a pair of kittens in the Berkshires reappear as cats in Manhattan, with a completely different owner. "I just thought, 'Do it.' Why? I'm not responsible for that." Similarly, he acted on an impulse to drop in a long eulogy for George Plimpton, and an account of the funeral. "I like to introduce something new about two thirds of the way through a book," he says. "Not just tying the threads together, but something brand new. It's a challenge. You just go out there and do it." And, as many writers do after the fact, he's belatedly discovering what he actually did. At what point did he see that the two important women in the novel, Amy and the "delighting" young writer Jamie Logan—the object of Zuckerman's dead-end desire—have usefully assonant names? This makes him laugh, too. "About a week ago."

It's not that Roth tosses his books off—he simply knows when to let intuition light up the drudgery. He still keeps factory-worker hours, and retains the curiosity of a cub reporter. For the glove factory in "American Pastoral," he found an old-timer in Gloversville, N.Y., who cut a glove for him, then made him cut one. ("You know, I lost them. I wore them in the country, to carry wood for the fireplace. I shouldn't have, but they fit so badly. They're probably there by the wood bin.") For "Everyman," he interviewed a Dominican jeweler on Broadway and called another jeweler in Chicago. For "I Married a Communist," he visited a zinc mine. And "Exit Ghost" is conspicuously knowledgeable about the luggage business and upper-crust life in Houston. "It's the best part of the writing," Roth says. "Especially after 'American Pastoral,' I just found that going out and learning something was the greatest pleasure. And I would often say, 'Why the hell didn't I go into the glove business? I'd be so much happier'."