The End of the Line

By TOVA MIRVIS

EXIT GHOST
By Philip Roth
304 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $26.

I didn’t care whether Harry Potter lived or died, but the thought of Nathan Zuckerman meeting a dark fate is too much to bear. And with Philip Roth’s new novel, Exit Ghost, being billed as the last Zuckerman adventure, there’s reason to worry.

In the case of Zuckerman, the scars he suffers are those of those of the ordinary man, the body aging, the mind softening. After prostrate cancer and its treatment, Zuckerman is rendered incontinent and impotent. The last time we saw Zuckerman, in The Human Stain, his medical condition was alluded to, but now it’s fully explicated, in unflinching detail of urine-soaked pads and plastic underwear. For years, he has accepted his fate, but drawn by the possibility of treatment, he returns to the hive of New York City to see a urologist, “unwilling to oppose the power of the crazed hope of rejuvenation that was affecting all my actions, the crazed hope of the procedure’s reversing the strongest side of my decline, and aware of the mistake I was making, a revenant, a man who’d cut himself off from sustained human contact and its possibilities yielding to the illusion of starting again.”

Once back in the city, he impulsively decides to trade apartments with a young couple, Billy Davidoff and Jamie Logan, both aspiring writers themselves. And suddenly, Zuckerman is on familiar territory, under the spell of a younger woman, in this case Jamie, who is also in possession of an adoring husband, a possible lover, and a consuming fear of Post-9/11 New York. Other pieces of Zuckerman’s past reemerge as well, and for the Zuckerman fan, making connections between the then and the now is one of the book’s greatest pleasures.

In earlier Zuckerman chronicles, the famed writer is hounded on street corners, rails at critics, and is castigated by family members. Now Zuckerman no longer reads the papers and rarely ventures out of his isolated Berkshires retreat. Then as now, he is the target of angry letters. But now those letters come not from angry pulpit rabbis or sanctimonious judges, as they do in previous novels, but from people making references to Jew Bastards and AK-47s. In the changed world to which Zuckerman returns, these letters no longer seem quite so funny as they did in the earlier novels.

But most heavily present is The Ghostwriter, Roth’s early Zuckerman book, in which the young scribbler meets the great short-story writer E. I. Lonoff, as well as Lonoff’s one-time student and lover Amy Bellette. Then the young Zuckerman conjures up a fantasy in which Amy is actually Anne Frank—who survived after all. Now, Amy is an impoverished old woman suffering from brain cancer, and an accidental sighting of her returns Zuckerman to thoughts of the evening he spent in Lonoff’s rural clapboard farmhouse.

Eager to talk to both Zuckerman and Amy is Richard Kliman, a would-be biographer who wants to restore Lonoff’s reputation by revealing a secret in his past. Kliman is not just any biographer, but a young, up-and-comer “savage with health and armed to the teeth with time,” to whom Zuckerman takes an immediate and intense dislike. It doesn’t help that Zuckerman imagines him to be Jamie’s lover—but mostly what Zuckerman detests is his swagger, his certainty, his sense of himself as invulnerable. “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. There it was, the tactless severity of vital male youth, not a single doubt about his coherence, blind with self-confidence and the virtue of knowing what matters most.”

It's overly coincidental, maybe, that Zuckerman would come across these figures from the past. But this is a novel of ghosts, not just in the form of these characters but the themes which have haunted all the previous Zuckerman books—in particular, the relationship between fiction and life. The character of Zuckerman himself is a ploy which enables Roth to both challenge as well as uphold the lines between life on and off the page. Through Zuckerman, who of course bares some resemblance to our author, Roth teases us with the similarities, then rebukes us for imagining him to be Zuckerman. For wondering, for example, about the state of his prostrate. Not even in books such as Operation Shylock and The Plot Against America, in which the protagonists bear the name Philip Roth, does Roth play so skillfully and dazzingly with the line between fact and fiction.

Zuckerman can shoot down many of those who attempt to read fiction as life, but it’s not as easy to contend with the professional biographer who would read fiction as confession. And as Zuckerman realizes, this is not just Lonoff’s fate; it will be his own as well. “A novel is not evidence…. A novel’s a novel,” Zuckerman tells Kliman. But this plea goes unheard, as it always does. “An astonishing thing it is, too” Zuckerman thinks, “that one’s prowess and achievement, such as they have been, should find their consummation in the retribution of biographical inquisition. The man in control of the words, the man making up the stories all his life, winds up, after death, remembered, if at all, for a story made up about him.”

But what control does he have? Many of Zuckerman’s contemporaries have already died, and Zuckerman knows he isn’t far behind. “You’re dying, old man, you’ll soon be dead. You smell of decay! You smell like death!” Kliman screams at him. To which Zuckerman muses: “But what could a specimen like Kliman know about the smell of death? All I smelled of was urine.”

Tensions between the young and the old, as well as the young and old versions of ourselves, abound throughout the novel. That tension will inevitably arise for readers of this book as well. How does the old Roth stack up against the young Roth? It’s an unfair question, when what has come before is so good. What lives up to the bewitching, labyrinthine Counterlife, to the outrageous fun of Zuckerman Unbound? This book is a little more restrained, more reflective. It possesses the same verbal flourish but the energy of the sentences is tempered by grief, just as the force of desire is mitigated by loss. Before Lonoff dies, he tells Amy, “The end is so immense; it is its own poetry. It requires little rhetoric. Just state it plainly.” Amy is haunted by these words and wonders if they’re a quote from someone. Zuckerman answers that it sounds exactly like Lonoff. It sounds like this book, too.