The Rake’s Progress Giving Up The Ghost

Certainly his hero hasn't had much fun. In "Exit Ghost," Zuckerman thinks he has one more book in him, to be called "He and She." (He'd considered "A Man in Diapers.") His preliminary notes—imagined dialogues between him and Jamie, in which he can't even fantasize cutting the mustard—make the heart sink, but doesn't his indomitability, such as it is, count for something? Similarly, at the end of "Everyman," doesn't the hero's final, glorious memory balance out, if only esthetically, the death that's shortly to come? Are these books as grim and terminal as they seem? "I think your words 'grim' and 'terminal' are correct," Roth says. "There's energy in the telling, there's energy in the depicting, but—for instance, in 'Everyman' I did bring back that scene of him being a kid at the beach. There's a strong presence of the sea in his memory, but he's still dying. He's still dying. I think the death strongly outweighs the final life-loving vision. I suppose you're reminded of the sensuous high point of his life. And in 'Exit Ghost,' of course, Zuckerman still won't let go, he's still sexual prey at the very end, he's still under a sexual enchantment, and he still has the wherewithal to imagine, so—you pays your money and you takes your choice."

Zuckerman begins his last story by evoking his 11-year self-exile with his trees and his typewriter. "I had ceased to inhabit not just the great world, but the present moment." There's one way you can tell him from Philip Roth, who greets you with a wisecrack about Larry Craig, who writes on the computer like the rest of us and whose fiction has engaged 48 years of present moments. But in "Exit Ghost," Zuckerman feels like a "revenant" while walking the streets of present-day Manhattan, and he's not the only shade around. Amy Bellette, herself soon to die, believes that the ghost of Lonoff dictated her letter to the Times. "Reading/writing people," Lonoff told her, "we are finished, we are ghosts witnessing the end of the literary era. Take this down." And in Amy's apartment, Zuckerman sees Lonoff's old easy chair, and recalls the slightly more optimistic ghost in T. S. Eliot's "Little Gidding," who tells the poet: "Last year's words belong to last year's language / And next year's words await another voice."

It's what every aging writer feels: whether the torch gets passed or the past gets torched, you won't be around. Zuckerman's gone, but Roth is still with us; on the other hand, Zuckerman will still be with us when Roth is gone. As the dying Lonoff said, bidding adieu to Amy: "The end is so immense, it is its own poetry. It requires little rhetoric. Just state it plainly." In "Exit Ghost," as in "Everyman," Roth has made a masterpiece by following this injunction. So smart of him to make it up.

Books by Philip Roth

Roth first wrote about a Nathan Zuckerman in "My Life as a Man" (1974). Back then he was a novelist invented by another invented novelist, David Tarnapol. Then he got real.

'The Ghost Writer' (1979)
Young Z visits his literary hero, falls for the man's mistress. Is she the grown-up Anne Frank?