false<![CDATA[Exit Ghost]]>http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1177433597m/703163.jpg70316321The last ordeal of Nathan Zuckerman, the indomitable literary adventurer of Roth's nine Zuckerman books, like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age. <p>Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jamie, whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body. <p>The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman's youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman's first literary hero, E. I. Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman depleted by illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere American writer who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing vocation. <p>The third connection is with Lonoff's would-be biographer, a young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff's "great secret." Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities. <p>Haunted by Roth's earlier work <i>The Ghost Writer</i>, <i>Exit Ghost</i> is an amazing leap into yet another phase in this great writer's insatiable commitment to fiction. <p><p><p> <span class="h1"><strong>Exit Zuckerman: Talking with Philip Roth</strong></span> <p><img src="http://g-ec2.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/books/a-plus/Roth_Philip2_140h.jpg" border="0" align="right"> When we talked with Philip Roth for the Amazon Wire podcast, we asked him about his long relationship with his fictional surrogate, Nathan Zuckerman, his decision to bring Zuckerman back (and say goodbye to him) in <i>Exit Ghost</i>, and the difficulties of aging for novelists, and we managed to touch on George Plimpton, Annie Dillard, Grace Paley, and <i>The Tempest</i>, along with nearly all of the nine Zuckerman books. You can listen to interview in the podcast above, or read the full transcript. <p><p><p> <span class="h1"><strong>Zuckerman Returns to Manhattan: Philip Roth Reads from <i>Exit Ghost</i></strong></span> <p>When Nathan Zuckerman returns to Manhattan from his self-imposed rural retreat for the first time in 11 years in <i>Exit Ghost</i>, what does he find? Along with his surprising and unsettling encounters with an aged and ill woman who had once been a young mystery to him, an aggressive biographer who won't take no for an answer, and an alluring young writer who tempts him back into the adventure of seduction, he is confronted with a city whose streets are filled with people behaving quite differently than a decade before. "For one who frequently went without talking to anyone for days at a time," he thinks. "I had to wonder what that had previously held them up had collapsed in people to make incessant talking into a telephone preferable to walking about under no one's surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating the street through one's animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of a city inspire." Listen to Philip Roth read an excerpt from <i>Exit Ghost</i>. <p><p><p> <span class="h1"><strong>Looking Back on Zuckerman</i></strong></span> <table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="33%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="35%" align="center"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0679748989.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg" border="0" align="right"></td> <td width="55%" align="left"><b><i>The Ghost Writer</i></b>: Introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer who spends a night in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff, and meets a haunting young woman whom he imagines could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution.</td><td width="10%"></td> </tr> </table></td> <td width="34%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="35%" align="center"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0679748997.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg" border="0" align="right"></td> <td width="55%" align="left"><b><i>Zuckerman Unbound</i></b>: Zuckerman, with newfound fame as a bestselling author, ventures onto the streets of Manhattan in the final year of the turbulent '60s, where he is assumed by fans and enemies to be his own fictional satyr, Gilbert Carnovsky ("Hey, you do all that stuff in that book?").</td><td width="10%"></td> </tr> </table></td> <td width="33%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="35%" align="center"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0679749020.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg" border="0" align="right"></td> <td width="55%" align="left"><b><i>The Anatomy Lesson</i></b>: At 40, Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious affliction--pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders, invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit. Zuckerman is unable to write a line, but the novel provides some of the funniest and fiercest scenes in all of Roth's fiction.</td><td width="10%"></td> </tr> </table></td> </tr> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="33%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="35%" align="center"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0679749039.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg" border="0" align="right"></td> <td width="55%" align="left"><b><i>The Prague Orgy</i></b>: In quest of the unpublished manuscript of a martyred Yiddish writer, Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied Prague in the mid-1970s, where he discovers, among the oppressed writers with whom he quickly becomes embroiled, an appealingly perverse kind of heroism.</td><td width="10%"></td> </tr> </table></td> <td width="34%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="35%" align="center"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1598530119.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg" border="0" align="right"></td> <td width="55%" align="left"><b><i>Zuckerman Bound</i></b>: The latest in the Library of America's collected Roth works brings together his first Zuckerman trilogy, <i>The Ghost Writer</i>, <i>Zuckerman Unbound</i>, and <i>The Anatomy Lesson</i>, along with the epilogue, <i>The Prague Orgy</i>.</td><td width="10%"></td> </tr> </table></td> <td width="33%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="35%" align="center"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0679749047.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg" border="0" align="right"></td> <td width="55%" align="left"><b><i>The Counterlife</i></b>: From New Jersey to England to the West Bank, the characters in <i>The Counterlife</i>, illuminated by the skeptical, enveloping intelligence of Nathan Zuckerman, are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate.</td><td width="10%"></td> </tr> </table></td> </tr> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="33%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="35%" align="center"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0375701427.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg" border="0" align="right"></td> <td width="55%" align="left"><b><i>American Pastoral</i></b>: Swede Levov, legendary high-school athlete and boyhood idol of Nathan Zuckerman, is wrenched overnight out of the American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk when his teenage daughter proves capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism.</td><td width="10%"></td> </tr> </table></td> <td width="34%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="35%" align="center"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0375707212.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg" border="0" align="right"></td> <td width="55%" align="left"><b><i>I Married a Communist</i></b>: The rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, takes the young Zuckerman under his wing, and is destroyed, as both a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s.</td><td width="10%"></td> </tr> </table></td> <td width="33%"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4"> <tr align="center" valign="top"> <td width="35%" align="center"><img src="http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0375726349.01.MZZZZZZZ.jpg" border="0" align="right"></td> <td width="55%" align="left"><b><i>The Human Stain</i></b>: Coleman Silk, an aging classics professor forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist, has a secret, kept for 50 years from all around him, including his friend Nathan Zuckerman, who sets out to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled.</td><td width="10%"></td> </tr> </table></td> </tr> </table><p><p><p align="left">28000761102007Exit Ghosttotal:942|5:127|4:351|3:327|2:107|1:30|94232641366200215falsefalseFri Apr 24 00:00:00 -0700 2009Sat Apr 11 23:12:45 -0700 2009Sun Apr 26 17:51:25 -0700 2009
American Pastoral, another Zuckerman-narrated Roth tome, I may have enjoyed this more. Or maybe even less. Either way, I couldn't help but compare it to the prior installment, a book in which the characters are unforgettable and certain scenes get played in my subconsciou...more...]]>
44falsefalseWed Mar 04 07:17:35 -0800 2009Tue Mar 17 08:26:49 -0700 2009
*at some point I'm hoping my life calms down enough to actually review this book so I can add my voice to the itsy bitsy pool of people out there reading Roth. I mean come on, the guy deserves an audience for h...more...]]>
52falsefalseMon Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007Mon Dec 31 14:38:45 -0800 2007Mon Dec 31 14:41:03 -0800 2007
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42falsefalseMon Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007Wed Sep 12 14:53:26 -0700 2007Tue Oct 23 11:49:22 -0700 2007
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51falsefalseWed Oct 22 00:00:00 -0700 2008Fri Oct 10 14:16:10 -0700 2008Thu Oct 23 08:47:13 -0700 2008 Nathan Zuckerman is a renowned writer who has lived in isolation in nat...more...]]>
41falsefalseFri Feb 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008Mon Feb 25 14:15:03 -0800 2008Tue Feb 26 09:34:33 -0800 2008
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31falsefalseSat Mar 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008Mon Dec 17 20:46:19 -0800 2007Tue Mar 25 14:08:14 -0700 2008
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41falsefalseTue May 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007Mon May 21 15:58:35 -0700 2007Mon May 21 16:07:40 -0700 2007
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51falsefalseMon Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007Mon Oct 08 16:06:14 -0700 2007Mon Oct 08 16:12:18 -0700 2007
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30falsefalseSat Jan 03 15:36:42 -0800 2009Sat Jan 03 15:36:55 -0800 2009
"In a Mobius striptease, the disrobing stripper is always on the point of getting dressed again, and there is no resolution to the revelation.
'A Mobius striptease in written form, Philip Roth's new novel, "Exit Ghost," is purportedly h...more...]]>
22falsefalseFri Dec 05 08:35:27 -0800 2008Fri Dec 05 08:53:27 -0800 2008 All right, that's o...more...]]>
40falsefalseThu May 28 19:03:46 -0700 2009Thu May 28 19:44:40 -0700 2009
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00falsefalseThu Feb 05 09:52:56 -0800 2009Thu Feb 05 09:52:56 -0800 2009
Veteran novelist Philip Roth labels Exit Ghost the "last ordeal" of his returning fictional narrator Nathan Zuckerman, a character whom critics hailed as one of "the supreme creations of American fiction" (Houston Chronicle). Though some critics found this last chapter of Zuckerm...more...]]>
30falsefalseFri May 29 00:00:00 -0700 2009Sun May 24 13:48:16 -0700 2009Fri May 29 16:17:06 -0700 2009
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20falsefalseTue Jan 27 23:50:31 -0800 2009Wed Feb 04 00:04:39 -0800 2009
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00falsefalseFri Nov 27 10:28:40 -0800 2009Fri Nov 27 10:33:31 -0800 2009
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51falsefalseMon Aug 17 15:30:27 -0700 2009Mon Aug 17 15:33:51 -0700 2009 But I picked up this book rece...more...]]>
10falsefalseFri Jan 23 00:00:00 -0800 2009Sat Jan 24 05:53:36 -0800 2009Sat Jan 24 12:41:36 -0800 20091 and only The characters are arrogant intellectual snobs. Example on page 85: a female character who is distraught...more...]]>
30falsefalseWed Feb 18 00:00:00 -0800 2009Wed Feb 04 14:03:13 -0800 2009Wed Feb 18 07:45:42 -0800 2009
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30falsefalseMon Dec 01 00:00:00 -0800 2008Sun Nov 16 10:18:23 -0800 2008Mon Dec 01 14:19:28 -0800 2008
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