Sale el espectro

Complete Nathan Zuckerman #9

by Philip Roth

Sale el espectro, la novela donde Roth dice adiós a Nathan Zuckerman, su célebre protagonista y álter ego, es un estudio profundo de la obsesión, del olvido, de la resignación y del deseo imposible de satisfacer.

Como un Rip Van Winkle que regresa a su ciudad natal y lo encuentra todo cambiado, Nathan Zuckerman vuelve a Nueva York, la ciudad que abandonó once años atrás.

Al recorrer las calles como un aparecido, enseguida establece tres relaciones que hacen estallar su cuidadosamente protegida soledad. La primera es con la joven pareja con la que acepta intercambiar domicilios. Pero desde el momento en que los conoce, Zuckerman también quiere intercambiar su soledad por el desafío erótico que representa la joven, Jamie, cuyo atractivo le hace volver a cuanto creía haber dejado atrás: la intimidad, el vibrante juego de los sentimientos y el cuerpo.

La segunda relación es con un personaje que Zuckerman conoció siendo joven: Amy Bellette, compañera y musa del primer héroe literario de Zuckerman, E. I. Lonoff. Amy, irresistible en el pasado, es ahora una anciana consumida por la enfermedad.

La tercera relación es con el aspirante a biógrafo de E. I. Lonoff, un joven sabueso literario que hará y dirá cualquier cosa para acceder al «gran secreto de Lonoff».

Sale el espectro, cuyas páginas tienen ecos de una obra anterior de Roth, La visita al maestro, es un salto asombroso en una nueva fase del insaciable compromiso de este gran escritor con la narrativa.

Genres: Fiction, American, Literary Fiction, Novels, Literature, Contemporary, Jewish

Paperback

First published October 1, 2007

About the author

Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.
Roth was one of the most honored American writers of his generation. He received the National Book Critics Circle award for The Counterlife, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman, a second National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater, and the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 2005, the Library of America began publishing his complete works, making him the second author so anthologized while still living, after Eudora Welty. Harold Bloom named him one of the four greatest American novelists of his day, along with Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. In 2001, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize in Prague.

Reviews

[Violeta · Rating 4 out of 5]

There has been considerable talk lately, among dear and perceptive friends here on GR, about Roth and his work. Robin read and loved his first book Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, Anne read and loved his last book Nemesis. Robin went on, at my suggestion, to read Deception and un-loved him, much as she had expected she would. Long comment threads ensued their terrific, thoughtful reviews. At some point Robin’s ingenious mind coined the term “Dick Lit”, a full definition of which you can find in comment no 37 in her review of Deception. All this got me thinking a lot about Roth, a writer I deeply admire and whose bulk of work I’ve read -surprisingly not Portnoy's Complaint, a book that seems to have affected the way many readers view his work, especially if they have read little or none of what he wrote after this provoking book that shot him to fame. So, for what it’s worth, here are a few thoughts on him:

I chose this book, which I read 13 year ago and is not one of his most popular ones, because it’s a book that defines the way Roth had been “in play” with his readers, asking for a constant involvement in his work. This is not a stand-alone novel, it’s the closing chapter of the Zuckerman books and the sequel to The Ghost Writer which had been written 28 years earlier. Who is Nathan Zuckerman? He’s a fictional character that Roth used as a protagonist or a narrator in many of his novels, a type of alter-ego that carries Roth’s convictions, afflictions and desires. In some books he’s actually meeting with a character named…Philip – and who is that if not the author himself conversing with his alter-ego? Phew! It takes enormous skill to support a construction of this kind, manage to involve your readers in the figments of your imagination and keep them following your characters book after book without ever letting them guess beforehand which one will pop-up next somewhere in the novel: Zucherman, Kepesh, or Roth himself??

He plays with his characters same as he plays with structure and form. In Exit Ghost there is first-person narration, third-person narration and large parts of direct dialogue in the form of a theatrical play created by Zuckerman, the protagonist, who’s inspired by his meeting with his (final) object of desire to create a captivating dialogue between a Him and a Her, creatures of his (fictional) imagination. You see where this is going? It goes the same way in so many of Roth’s books and it never fails to enthrall whoever chooses to check in aboard his flights of fancy.
At some point he has Zuckerman describing the work of another character/author in the novel (who could also very well be Roth) with the phrase “his fiction had never been only enactment, it was reflection in narrative form” . For this and for the following sentence (both of which I’m amateurishly translating because my copy is in Greek) he has my utmost regard: For some, all that hasn’t been experienced, all that was insinuated, when found imprinted on paper, amount to a real life, a life that its meaning often comes to weigh far more.

I think this is a phrase that applies to both writers and readers; together they form the Holly Alliance of Invention. Roth nods in acknowledgement to both parties of this alliance. Invention was his lifelong game. His critics hold against him that his books are variations on his sole theme: Himself - in successive ages and roles. He always objected to that claiming that he wasn’t interested in exposing or even expressing himself but in inventing his various selves, his diverse worlds contained within himself. He went as far as to say that the characterization of his books as autobiographical or confessional was downgrading the literary aptness with which he managed to make them appear as such. Such smugness! I don’t know about you, but I love argumentative and mischievous statements of this caliber. :)

His “slips” into autobiography are maneuvered and controlled by fiction. He doesn’t only narrate lives, he uses fiction to explore all the possible alternatives. Life is only lived once and can be narrated in the past tense. Roth has us believing that life can be the stuff of dreams, it can be narrated in present and in future tense. The power of his fiction is his ability to give “substance” to this dream, to reshuffle the cards of the game called Life and convince us that this game can be invented time and again. He writes in order to multiply his identities, same as actors are multiplied through their roles.
A marked characteristic of Roth’s themes is this reluctance to give a definitive narration and interpretation of a fictional life, ideology or character. It’s best expressed in this stunning excerpt from American Pastoral:

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.”

Another reason I chose this book is because in it Zuckerman, after nine novels, makes his exit never to reappear in another one. The closing paragraph containing this exit is one of the most unadorned and wrenching I have ever read. With this final curtain Roth also bade farewell to his aforementioned Dick Lit period (that, frankly, embodies the whole of his works minus a few novels, mostly written near the end of his career). For a man so preoccupied with… dicks and desire the impending fall (in the most literal sense) and decline must have been devastating.

Which brings me to the question of…humor (of all things) in the Roth-ian universe. In Anne’s review of Nemesis, in comment no 50, Fionnuala, another dear friend whose judgment and thoughtfulness I appreciate, wondered if "humor goes a long way to make up for a writer’s preoccupation with his characters’ dicks. “ She went on to conclude that “for me, it definitely does. Writers who can laugh at themselves are not the ones I think of as “dicks”.

Roth’s humor: it’s subversive, often sacrilegious, nowhere more so than in Sabbath's Theater. He uses it to undermine the weighty seriousness of his themes. Yes, they are deadly serious; the darkness at their core is lurking behind the dicks, the breasts and the lust ever present. Equally present are illness, death and the pain of loss. I deliberately leave Jewishness out because that’s a whole other conversation. His eccentric humor is his way to defuse anxiety. He perceives human condition as a black comedy, the components of which are cruelness, eroticism, existential agony and sarcastic indifference. His sarcasm is nothing but a plea to the reader (and to himself, possibly?) to make peace with the pitifulness of human existence, to accept the world as IS and not as it should be. It’s his way of saying: this is the world we happen to live in; there are no American Pastorals, pastorals are indeed nowhere to be found. Except maybe…within?? Roth does those of his readers who are, even slightly, on board with this view a service by pointing to the futility of thinking otherwise.

Whether he did himself a service, who can say? A year before Exit Ghost he had written Everyman, where the nameless (for once) hero confronts the prospect of his death in this short, immensely poignant novel. Three years after Exit Ghost he wrote his last book, Nemesis, and two years later, in 2012, he publicly announced his retirement from writing with the phrase ”to tell you the truth, I’m done”. Simple. Much like the way Zuckerman, the ghost-writer, exits from the fictional world of the author. He spent his last years, until his death in 2018, in recluse in the countryside, in upstate New York (again like Zuckerman in the book), having decided he had nothing more to offer. He honored his decision, it wasn’t a publicity stunt and that says something about the man. I felt very sorry when I heard the news of his death; it was like losing someone close, a relative, and in a way he was one, because his work opened up new ways of seeing and had a deep impact on my way of thinking. I guess there are and always will be many who feel the same way. I don’t know if that would be of any comfort to someone like him who once said “The only reading resembling the ideal reading that a writer yearns for is the writer’s reading of himself. Every other reading is a surprise, a misreading…To be misread in any way that bears thinking about, however, a writer has to be read.”. Well, he should have rested assured that he is.


Philip Roth 1933-2018


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[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Exit, ghost”—in Hamlet (and Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and so on).

“Reading/writing people, we are finished, we are ghosts witnessing the end of a literary era"—Lonoff, in The Ghost Writer

“. . . The end is so immense, it is its own poetry. It requires little rhetoric. Just state it plainly”—Roth, Exit Ghost

Exit Ghost is the last of the Nathan Zuckerman series of ten books (yay, done!), Zuck at 71, as was Roth at the time. No one really knows who Roth is, of course; he’s the literary version of Jokerman, like Dylan, a man of many disguises. In some of his books "Philip Roth" is featured; is that the author?! Zuckerman has been his “ghost writer” for decades, since his introduction in 1976 in My Life as a Man, where he is featured as a writer in a couple short stories within the novel. In Exit, Zuck is, post-prostate cancer surgery, incontinent and impotent, living eleven years in the mountains in upstate New York, isolated, just writing every day and re-reading the works of some of his beloved novelists, references to whom make their way through this book: Conrad, Hardy, Bellow, and others.

Roth decides, encouraged by some hopeful medical news about his bladder, to try to “begin again” in Manhattan, and tries to house-swap for a time with young writers Jamie and Billy. Zuck, 71, unable to perform, nevertheless makes a kind of move for Jamie, 30, who is happily married to Billy. This Woody Allen stuff I read at the wrong historical moment to be sympathetic, during the great expose of sexual assault all over the country, so it feels (in part!) tired and sad to read that Zuck still succumbs to “the greed of desire,” yet he makes it clear this is part of the impulse (in addition to reading and writing) that keeps him on the planet:

“And so I set out to minimize the loss by struggling to pretend that desire had naturally abated, until I came in contact for barely an hour with a beautiful, privileged, intelligent, self-possessed, languid-looking 30-year-old made enticingly vulnerable by her fears and I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again.”

I love women, so sue me, as Zuck might say. Desire is part of being human. But what part does impotence play in this scenario, and our judgment of his behavior? Zuck is, like Roth, a fiction writer; he may not be able to physically "have" Jamie , but as long as he can imagine her, he is whole again. At various points we can see desire is fiction, his fantasy. The way the Jamie issue resolves itself is in part tied up with Zuck’s meeting, after decades, with Amy, the woman he met in 1956 visiting his literary hero E. I. Lonoff (Zuck fantasized Amy might actually be Anne Frank, yes, still-alive, escaped-from-Bergen-Belsen; so the secular atheist Jew that Jews saw as self-hating could make restitution, Zuck could marry Anne Frank!) (He doesn’t). We meet Amy and Lonoff in The Ghost Writer (there’s that ghost!). Amy, now 75, and Zuck at 71, have compromised brains; she from brain cancer, he from what he fears is senility; his memory is going fast. At any rate, Zuck falls for Amy 50 years ago, and again falls for Jamie. It never ends; or, it will only end when Zuck does.

As with The American trilogy, we return to yet another moment in American politics in this one as the 2004 re-election of Bush is raged about by Jamie: “these people are evil!” but reflected on by Zuck as yet another moment of outrage in American history just as were Pearl Harbor, Vietnam, the assassinations of JFK and MLK, the making of war-hawk LBJ, the rise of crook Nixon, and so on. [What does Roth say about Trump, asked recently about him by The New Yorker? He says Trump is way worse than Roth’s fascist alt-history nightmare, The Plot Against America].

In case you think Zuckerman’s is a story about just another arrogant libidinous American male, well he is, but he is also darkly, comically honest about the incontinence/impotence/memory loss. I want to live, Zuck says! I want to write and be fully human in all respects! And who can blame him!? But can he be happy in physical and mental decline? And is Jamie fully human to him, or just a fantasy for his own selfish satisfaction?

I wouldn’t read this book at all unless you are familiar with some of the previous Zuckerman books (or at least, The Ghost Writer, to which it is a kind of sequel, decades after). It is a book like a number of later Roth books, about aging and decline, sometimes sad, yet still somehow defiant and unapologetic about writing and desire. It’s about talk, about vibrant dialogue, as usual in Roth, and still good work. It’s about fiction! Roth retired from writing in 2012, but this isn't weak, over-the-hill writing. It is a fitting end to the Zuckerman series.

Roth’s last interview?:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

But there will be a definitive, author-sanctioned biography by Blake Bailey (2022 is the date Bailey says it will come out)

[Adam Dalva · Rating 4 out of 5]

And with this I come to the end of the Zuckerman books. I can't imagine reading this w/o the context of the earlier writing, particularly without The Ghostwriter, which this neatly bookends. As a stand-alone work, it, alone of the Zuckermans, wouldn't quite function. But as the last chapter in a massive writing project - it's lovely. Melancholy, but there are thrilling moments where the Zuckerman of old surfaces. The other strange aspect is encountering, for the first time, Nathan in a world I know. It is formally bold, and has the loveliest pure writing, I think, of any of it.

I've been thinking about the comparison between the Rabbit books and the Zuckermans. The Rabbits, in the end, I would say reached higher literary highs. But Rabbit himself is no Nathan. This is a character who lives for 50 years, and changes for all of it, and despite all his flaws, you end up falling for him.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

I started reading Roth with American Pastoral which intrigued me and then Portnoy's Complaint which fascinated me. I have become deeply attached to Roth's writing having now read 19 of his books over the past few months. As much as I loved Sabbath's Theater, The Counterlife, Operation Shylock. the Nemesis tetralogy (and hot having read any of the David Kapesh books as yet), I feel that the most monumental writing of his is the Zuckerman cycle which Exit Ghost closes. It is a neat, clean closure.

The death of Nathan Zuckerman was even eulogised in the The Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...). He was, of course, Philip Roth's fictional alter-ego. The Zuckerman Unbound tetralogy starts with The Ghost Writer which introduces E.I. Lonoff who the young Nathan idolizes and who is will leave with his student Amy Bellette who Nathan fantasies to be Anne Frank. The other three books of the trilogy talk about Nathan's life following the scandal around his book Carnovsky (the fictionalised doppleganger for Portnoy's Complaint). The Anatomy Lesson talks of his aging and an abortive attempt at becoming a doctor. In The Prague Orgy, he goes to the police state Czechoslovakia and fails to recover the short stories of the father of a Czech political refugee in NYC. In all these stories, we see Nathan go from a young, enthusiastic writer-to-be and his semi-retirement from writing. The American Trilogy, in which Nathan is a character sopping up the biographies of three fascinating people in his life plus Carnovsky is his output. Until Exit Ghost.

Exit Ghost in a brilliant tour de force in that he inverses the relationship between himself as the young admiring acolyte to Lonoff to become the antagonistic relationship between a would-be sensationalising biographer of the now-dead Lonoff, Richard Kliman. Richard is brash, uncouth, and unconcerned with literature as literature but just obsessed with literature as sensationalism. That would not be enough to make this an extraordinary book. No, not for Roth. He adds incredible levels of depth but having the aging Nathan in NYC for surgery to aid his problems with inconstancy following a successful prostate surgery - but also, he is fleeing death threats made to him at his house in the Berkshires. As coincidence would have it, he decides to exchange his house for the apartment of Jamie and Billy Logan. Of course, Nathan would not be Nathan if he didn't fall for the beautiful Jamie who it turns out is probably the impulsive Richard's lover. Add to this the fact that Amy Bellette, who has a brain tumor from which she is certainly dying is drawn into the mess via the boisterousness of Richard ruthlessly pursuing his biography of Lonoff by harassing Amy for Lonoff's last manuscript. I won't spoil anything further here. I just want to demonstrate how Philip Roth can take a single string and make it into a beautiful, elaborate quilt about love, adultery, ageing, dying, and literature.

Two short examples:
At one point, he is with younger friends who help care for his Berkshire house and when they ask what it is like to be 70 years old, he stands up and says, "It'll be a short speech. Think of the year 4000...Think seriously about 4000. Imagine it. In all its dimensions, in all its aspects, The year 4000" after which he sits down and says quietly, "That's what it's like to be seventy." I found that absolutely brilliant.

The other quote which I adored was "For some very very few that amplification, evolving uncertinly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise fully drawn in print on paper is the life whose meaning comes to matter most."

Read Roth. Enjoy Zuckerman. Carpe diem. And may Roth someday (before he, like Zuckerman passes from this world) get that Nobel Prize for Literature that he so well deserves.
RIP (1933-2018). One of America's literary giants has left us and unfortunately before getting a Nobel :(

[Jason Koivu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Roth makes me so depressed. I grew up on Charlie Brown holiday specials and Mr. Rodgers, so I feel right at home!

In Exit Ghost we have an aging writer, greatly concerned with his failing bladder and memory, worrying his way to an early grave. However, before he's allowed a graceful exit, a young woman comes along and reignites his useless libido. As if that wasn't enough, a young man forces himself upon the writer compelling him to defend a revered and long dead author with feeble rage and indignant righteousness, remnants of his lost youth.

Expect no sweeping dramatics, no whirlwind physical force. This is well-written reality. Whether or not these scenarios actually happened to him, Roth is essentially writing about himself. He and his main character are the same age, come from the same sort of background and have had the same kind of career. When he writes of 9/11 and the death of George Plimpton, you get the sense these are more or less essays by Roth inserted into the novel. The fiction of Exit Ghost may very well be no more than a tweak or two of day to day happenings in his life. It is not as banal as a daily diary by any means, but if you came for excitement you'll find it in short supply here.

What you get with Roth is an easy flow of erudite observations on the minutia of human behavior and the occasional carver's chisel tap upon the great marble block that is mankind. The language is never too flowery to bury meaning in platitudes or too obtuse to go beyond understanding, it's just a matter of whether the reader's mind is prepared for a marathon of thought. And don't expect encouragement along the way. This reads like the middle miles, not the jubilant starting line or the heady finish.

Perhaps I should have read Roth's The Ghost Writer first, since Exit Ghost is its sequel. It seems to stand alone well enough, but reading the initial novel would've perhaps made the characters' lives more meaningful. Perhaps it would've made all the desperate feelings of the inevitability of death all the worse. I'm over 40 and already worried about contracting the big C or copping it from a heart attack in the middle of the night. I don't need stuff like this to add to my concerns!

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read a lot of Roth (not all of them, but most of the Zuckermans, and this was a fitting send-off for old Nathan, and an ambiguous riposte of sorts to those readers and critics who would speciously equate him with Roth—as we all tend to do at times with authors, in our moments of forgetfulness, weakness, envy or spite), and this was one of the most purely enjoyable for me for some weird reason, and I wish it wasn't as short as it is. It has something to do with my not knowing quite where I stand as a reader (and in this it definitely reminded me of two of my favourites, The Counterlife and Operation Shylock), and that in this feeling of existential doubt and disorientation I was definitely joined by the main character, Zuckerman. I won't get into the details—there are plenty of other, and better reviews that do this most admirably, but reading it alongside (longtime friend of the author) Milan Kundera's novel The Joke and I am most poignantly struck by parallels in the existential crises experienced by Zuckerman here and Ludvik in that novel—how everything you believe in, stand for and work towards can be swiftly and irrevocably ripped away from you by forces beyond our control, be they forces of the societal or unconscious variety, or both, working, conspiring we almost feel, in tandem against us.

[Sam K G · Rating 5 out of 5]

In characteristic Roth style, the novel is filled with references to the great writers. Joseph Conrad features prominently; Zuckerman and Jamie discuss his novella ‘The Shadow Line’ in depth. E.I. Lonoff is often compared with Bernard Malamud, and a small biographical conundrum in the life of Nathaniel Hawthorne receives rather intense scrutiny. Passing references are made to Isaac B. Singer, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and William Faulkner. One of Saul Bellow’s novels is mentioned by title. Of living contemporaries, I caught references to Salman Rushdie and Norman Mailer, though neither in relation to his literature. (I considered the Mailer reference generous, considering his boisterous history on the New York literary scene.) And there is a beautiful anecdote where Amy loses her self-control in the New York Public Library over an exhibit on contemporary American writers.
But Roth does not just drop names. This is not a reading-review list. Every author he mentions has a purpose; each is woven into the narrative. In a recent interview with Newsweek’s David Gates, Roth said, “What I’m doing is bidding adieu to the great writers.” In his interior play ‘He and She,’ Conrad’s phrase “rash moments” receives much focus. Throughout the book, Roth mentions Melville’s remarks on the life of Hawthorne, which ties into Lonoff’s unknown early biography, and then Lonoff’s being compared with Singer (as both being Jewish-American short story writers) in the publications of the Library of America. And near the end of the novel there is an unexpected but wonderfully received panegyric to George Plimpton, given by Zuckerman (or Roth), one feels, as a parting homage to the dead men of a much different literary age.

Roth of course has his favorites, the writers who show up again and again in his works, but the book can still be read in enjoyment without playing literary “Where’s Waldo.”

There is simply no doubt that Roth is a master at the written language. Every sentence and every paragraph is a minor work of art and poetry. And Roth the storyteller has been proved once again to be still at the top of his game. But this novel is more an epilogue to a literary life that a work that can hold its own. This is not a book I would suggest to a first-time Philip Roth reader. While Roth recaps some of Zuckerman’s background, there is simply too much complexity in the character for a summary to do him justice. If you have not lived with Zuckerman from the beginning, have not seen who he was before he grew old and impotent, then this book will lack most of the gravity that it had for me.

What then would I recommend? Start from the beginning. Read ‘Goodbye Columbus’ and then some of the early short stories. Nathan Zuckerman is as much a product of the early Roth as any of the later fiction, so begin where Roth began and work forward. But read Philip Roth. His work will be the literature that is talked about long into our adulthoods.
Find the time. It’s worth it.


(Extracts from an article originally written for the Washington Square News, New York University's Student Newspaper.)

[Gabril · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Mi ero abituato alla solitudine, a una solitudine senza angosce, e con essa al piacere di essere irreperibile e libero: paradossalmente, libero soprattutto da me stesso.“

Lo scrittore fantasma è tornato a New York dopo alcuni anni di volontario isolamento in una casetta situata nella zona montagnosa del Berkshire, lontano da tutti e da tutto.
Un luogo simbolico, che fu il rifugio di E.I. Lonoff, il venerato scrittore che Nathan Zuckerman, ventitreenne giovane promessa della letteratura, andò a trovare arrancando tra muraglie di neve e le cui vicissitudini sono raccontate nel primo libro dedicato all’alter ego di Roth: Lo scrittore fantasma.

Ora il cerchio si chiude. Zuckerman ha più di settant’anni. È arrivato il tempo dei congedi.
Dalla tirannia del desiderio, dalla nostalgia di una virilità ormai perduta, dalla partecipazione accorata alla deriva della politica americana (è il 2004, rielezione di Bush), dalla vanità della fama (“i giorni vanagloriosi dell’autoaffermazione sono finiti”) e dall’illusione di poter guarire dalla sua malattia (“provai l’amara impotenza di un vecchio schernito che moriva dalla voglia di essere ancora integro”).

Ma la città che vide la pienezza della vita e nella quale Nathan si persuade di poter riconquistare un rinnovato vigore gli riserva alcune sorprese, nella forma degli incontri: primo fra tutti quelli con Jamie, avvenente trentenne sposata con Billy, che risusciterà quei fantasmi del desiderio da cui il narratore si sentiva erroneamente al sicuro. La ruota viziosa che reclama dalla vita i suoi frutti più succulenti ricomincia così a girare, ignara del tempo e della decadenza fisica.
“Non c’è frangente da cui l’infatuazione sia incapace di trarre alimento. Mi bastava guardarla per trasalire: lasciavo che mi entrasse negli occhi come un mangiatore di spade inghiotte una lama.”

Ma c’è anche qualcosa che torna dal passato: ecco apparire, irriconoscibile e deturpata dalla malattia, Amy Bellette, la ragazza che quella notte di molti anni prima unì fatalmente la sua vita a quella di Lonoff e sulla quale Zuckerman fantasticò un impossibile congiungimento e una possibile storia di salvezza dai lager nazisti. (L’ebraismo rimane il tema di fondo che sentiamo spesso risuonare nei libri di P.Roth).

Ancora: l’inesorabile confronto tra la belligerante vitalità della giovinezza e il declino implacabile della vecchiaia, tra la presunzione di conquistare lustro e fama di scrittore ed esserlo veramente, tra l’arte di scrivere romanzi e il saccheggio necroforo di scrivere una biografia: “E non è stupefacente che la propria bravura, i propri successi, quali siano stati, debbano trovare la loro consumazione nel castigo dell’inquisizione biografica?“ (Una biografia, Nathan. Non la voglio. È una seconda morte. Dà un altro alt alla vita rendendola immutabile per sempre”).

E poi la scrittura, un altro effetto del desiderio: il fuoco dell’ispirazione e della disciplina che fa esistere ciò che non è. (Come dice Wisława Szymborska: “La gioia di scrivere/ Il potere di perpetuare/ La vendetta d’una mano mortale”).

Infine su tutto si erge come uno spettro shakespeariano il tema dei temi: la morte; la falce che porta via tutti, puntale e implacabile, ma pur sempre inattesa (“morì come moriamo tutti: da volgari dilettanti”).

“E strada facendo, come Amy, come Lonoff, come Plimpton, come tutta la gente al cimitero che aveva affrontato coraggiosamente l’impresa e il dovere, sarei morto anch’io, ma non prima di essermi seduto al tavolo vicino alla finestra, guardando fuori nella luce grigia di un mattino di novembre, oltre a una strada spolverata di neve e fino alle acque silenziose increspate dal vento della palude…”

Cioè non prima di avere scritto le battute finali dell’eterna commedia del desiderio, fino al punto in cui la realtà afferma il suo primato sull’immaginazione e il Fantasma esce di scena.

[robin friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Growing Old With Fiction

Set in Manhattan in 2004, Philip Roth's novel "Exit Ghost" (2007) is a product of the writer's old age which plays tantalizingly with both biography and autobiography. The book is a story of the nature of fiction and creative writing and of the vicissitudes of aging.

The novel's voice is that of Roth's frequently-used character, the author Nathan Zuckerman. At the age of 71 Zuckerman has left his 11-year home in a remote community in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts for a trip to his former home of New York City. Zuckerman has become a solitary, especially after the events of September 11, 2001. He has few friends, sees few people, does not follow current events, and is devoted solely to his writing and to rereading books he enjoyed in his youth. Zuckerman decides to travel to New York in hopes for a surgical cure to the incontinence which has plagued him following surgery for prostate cancer some years earlier. The surgery also left the once virile Zuckerman impotent, a circumstance for which their appears to be no cure.

The Berkshires were also home to the great American novelists, Hawthorne and Melville, as Zuckerman is aware, and to a fictitious short story writer that becomes an important character in this book, E.I. Lonoff. Lonoff is described as a mentor of Zuckerman who offered the fledgling writer encouragement in the mid-1950s. The young Zuckerman was visiting Lonoff when the older writer's wife of 35 years walked out on him because Lonoff was romantically involved with a young woman named Amy Bellette who also was present during the night that saw the effective end of Lonoff's marriage.

When Zuckerman reports to the Manhattan hospital, he has a passing encounter with Amy Bellette, Lonoff's former lover, who is now 75 years old and disfigured from brain cancer. Zuckermann begins to think again about Lonoff and about his own younger years. Then, on an impulse, Zuckerman responds to an ad in a literary magazine in which a young couple offer to swap their Manhattan apartment for one year in exchange for a rural home in New England. The couple placing the add are a pair of aspiring authors, Bill Davidoff and his wife Jamie Logan. The aging, impotent, and incontinent Zuckerman becomes instantly smitten with the young wife Jamie.

To complicate the story further, Jamie has an old Harvard friend, Richard Kliman, himself eager to make a literary name for himself. Kliman is writing a biography of the now-undeservedly forgotten writer, Lonoff, and he believes Zuckerman can help him. Jamie gives Kliman a lead to the unwilling Zuckerman which in turn leads Zuckerman back to Amy Bellette for their shared recollections of the great short story writer. Kliman wants to restore Lonoff's literary reputation, but he also believes he has uncovered a secret in Lonoff's personal life: an affair that the writer had beginning at the age of 14 and continuing to the age of 17 with his half-sister.

As the tangled story develops, Zuckerman must deal with his passionate but futile feelings for Jamie and with his desire to prevent Kliman from publishing what Zuckerman believes to be questionable and scurrilous information about his former literary mentor. As a writer will do, Zuckerman takes his few brief, cryptic encounters with Jamie during his stay in New York and blows them up in his imagination. Zuckerman writes for his own edification a short play consisting of fictitious versions of dialogue between Jamie and himself that he titles "He and She." From a literary standpoint, "He and She" is awful.

There are a several levels to this book. We have the author, Roth, telling a story in the words of what may be his thinly-disguised alter ego, Zuckerman. Zuckerman becomes irate when he learns a literary hero of his, Lonoff, is about to become the subject of a biography exposing sordid details of the writer's early life. The Lonoff story seems to warn the reader about taking the Zukerman story too closely as a biography of the aging Roth while at the same time it suggests the connection. And again, in writing the fictitious play "He and She" Zuckerman takes his own infatuation with the beautiful and articulate young Jamie Logan to a level of reality that it does not possess in what Zuckerman tells the reader in fact transpires between Jamie and himself. In the meanwhile, Zuckerman shows himself as troubled by impending loss of memory, possible senility, his continued and hopeless sexual impotence, and ultimately by death. After a long meditation on the death of a friend, George Plimpton, Zuckerman observes: "[h]e died, as we all do: as a rank amateur." (p.264)

Roth's book is about the nature of literature and how it captures reality in a manner different from and deeper than mere factual reportage. The book is full of literary allusions in addition to the allusion to the fictitious writer Lonoff. The primary literary reference is to Joseph Conrad's late novel "The Shadow Line" with its references to coming to terms with age and maturity and perhaps to ghosts as well. (One of the references to "ghosts" in the novel uses the figure in terms of lost sexuality, as in Zuckerman's feeling for Jamie as the "ghost of my desire", p. 66). Other literary allusions in the book include T.S. Elliott, E.E. Cummings, Hemingway, Bellow,, Faulkner, Chekov,, Keats, and Hawthorne and Melville. This book is less successful than many of Roth's other books, probably due to the contrived plotting and to the weaknesses of the "He and She" segments. But it remains a thoughtful, ironic exploration of the nature of literature and of growing old.

Robin Friedman

[Kathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you liked this book, I have some very fine cloth to sell you. It has special properties which make it invisible to the eyes of fools and simpletons. You might want to make a nice sweater out of it. It is very, very expensive, though -- a cloth fit for an emperor.

All right, that's obnoxious of me. But I don't come to this novel as someone who is unfamiliar with Philip Roth (I liked Ghost Writer, loved Goodbye, Columbus and think American Pastoral is almost a masterpiece), and thus I don't feel I need to hedge my bets by suggesting that Roth is somehow over my head. This is simply an amorphous mess -- a jumble of half-baked thoughts, poorly imagined scenes, annoying and barely believable characters (except, perhaps, for Zuckerman himself, but he benefits from the reader's extra-textual or intertextual familiarity with his foibles).

I like Nathan Zuckerman better when he has a clue that it's just not all about him. To the Nathan Zuckerman of Exit Ghost, I say goodbye and good riddance.

[Doug · Rating 5 out of 5]

A phenomenal five star book. Looks like a tiny book to be read on a Friday, but I found that I needed time to read and reread many sentences. So many of the sentences and paragraphs belong in quotes stand there and force you to wonder how one can write so perfectly. I started off reading this in my Film Noir inner voice then shifted to my Tell Tale Heart voice - finally I just read it the way I read Sprinhgsteen lyrics with respect. There is a great story, settings and characters in there too, but I admired the words above all.

[Iulia · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Doar" Roth.

[Lisa Reads & Reviews · Rating 4 out of 5]

I need not critique Roth, I think. He is a skilled and professional writer recognized as such through numerous awards, etc. Instead, I'll use this review to remind myself of what was interesting and instructive about this novel: 1) The narrative flow, sentence construction, and all mechanics of writing are smoothly modeled here, and make for good reference. I simply enjoyed the writing. 2) The overwhelming theme, and one that will be useful for understanding a population of humanity that I'll not directly experience: the aging of successful men "has-beens" as they look back on their lives and interact with the young "not-yets" and all the emotional turmoil that entails. Women have their version, I'm certain, but I felt an empathy for the physical and emotional adaptations that come with aging. They were especially poignant here--perhaps due to the modern references of 9/11 and the tragedy of Bush's re-election. All that pain is a tad more bearable in hind-sight, and through a pair of old man's glasses.

[Andrew Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

To say that this is a grim story of an old man’s battle with incontinence, impotence and lust for a much younger woman would be technically correct, but it really doesn’t do this book justice. Nathan Zuckerman (Roth’s alter ego) is the fictional writer Roth has featured in nine of his novels, with this almost certainly being the last.

The story follows the absorbing The Human Stain as Zuckerman travels back to his native NYC after a prolonged exile in the rural Berkshires. In Manhattan he meets the object of his desire and picks up the thread of a story laid out in an earlier book, Ghost Writer. Though it is sometimes uncomfortable reading (Roth’s books often are), as Zuckerman struggles with the loss of his physical and mental potency, the writing is of the very highest quality and I found the whole thing totally engrossing.

[Mauoijenn · Rating 1 out of 5]

I guess today is not my day with books. Another one I tried to get into but it just lost me about 30 pages into it. The man is dying. Doesn't like modern technology and well that's about all I got out of this.

[Богиня Книдска · Rating 5 out of 5]

Отново многопластов Рот, леко депресивен, но едновременно с това оптимистичен.
Всяка негова дума в това толкова интертекстуално повествование вибрира в определен цвят. Като основният обаче е жълтият. Жълтият, но не жизнерадостното, ярко и сочно жълто като на зрял лимон, а леко завехналият цвят на изморен нарцис. Жълтият цвят, който никога не била модната рокля на Ейми.
Страстта на Цукерман е кремава като упойваща тубероза, а самият Цукерман е в цвят на избеляло бледосиво. Елегичен и объркан, но все още жив.

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

First-person Zuckerman. My fave sort. Enjoyable, readable. Generous conversational narration with typical Shakespearean flourishes. Trailblazes a new genre of chick lit for the geriatric set: instead of being all about men, marriage, fashion, and babies, it's about death, impotence, incontinence, dead 20th century literary figures, senility, and arrow of desires aimed at the much-younger loins of alluring ladies. Like Everyman, I felt this one was a little less than Roth can do. Everyman felt like a sketch for a Roth novel -- and in a way it may have been a sketch for Exit Ghost, which feels like 4/5ths of a recent Roth book, compared to Plot Against America or American Pastoral or even The Human Stain. Lots of theatrical dialogue speeds things up, as though he's in a rush, self-consciously, to get this story out before his mind dissolves. It's a fine story, with occasional stereotypes he presents to a sort of readerly queasiness but then to which he miraculously applies pages of extraordinarily generous, flowing, insightful prose till the semi-jarring ughness of a plot twist or character revelation is totally triaged, that is, made believable in such a way that you, or I at least, admire the man's audacity. Almost a great book. But almost a great book that, if great, might not have been as great as it is, because a failure to be great is sort of required of this one's thematic content? A dissolution? Repetition not for emphasis but as a memory aid? Totally worth reading. Quick. Fun. A great essayistic eulogy on George Plimptom so surprisingly placed in the novel I feel like I should have written SPOILER WARNING before I wrote this sentence.

[Ginny_1807 · Rating 5 out of 5]

”Forse le scoperte più potenti sono riservate all'ultimo”
Nathan Zuckerman è l’ombra dell’uomo che è stato, un morto volontario alla vita nel presente, essendosi ritirato in un luogo isolato da undici anni per dedicarsi unicamente alla scrittura, lontano dai giudizi e dagli occhi indiscreti del mondo.
Una scelta di solitudine estrema, in origine maturata col pretesto di sfuggire a inquietanti, anonime - e forse vuote -, minacce di morte e in seguito consolidatasi come replica orgogliosa e sprezzante di fronte all'insorgere del decadimento fisico e mentale, imputabile all'avanzare dell’età e agli esiti umilianti della malattia.
A stanarlo dal suo eremo, però, riaffiora impetuosa e inattesa la speranza, che lo riporta per un breve soggiorno a New York e, di conseguenza, a tutto ciò che credeva di avere ormai lasciato per sempre.
Il fantasma riappare così sulla scena del mondo, richiamato dalla remota possibilità di recuperare parte della sua integrità fisica. Una settimana di ritorno abbacinante alla vita, ai sentimenti, alle emozioni: la politica, gli ambienti letterari, la frequentazione di conoscenze vecchie e nuove, perfino l’ossessione sessuale per una giovane donna.
Amaro, spietato e struggente, questo romanzo richiama nei toni e nei temi trattati lo splendido Everyman, con in più una differente prospettiva nel modo di rapportarsi al passato: là infatti l’amore per la vita era esaltato dal rimpianto di chi dal nulla non poteva più farvi ritorno, mentre qui è proprio il ritorno frastornante alla vita tanto amata a consolidare la certezza di non potervi più prendere parte pienamente e di avere il nulla come unica alternativa possibile.

[Rachelle Bergstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Phillip Roth is killing Nathan Zuckerman. And he’s doing it in the least humane – but most human – ways: depriving him of his dignity, stripping him of his sexual prowess. Roth, who for much of his career has allowed readers to view Zuckerman as an extension, if not mirror, of himself, toys with this conceit even more obviously in Exit Ghost. Impotent Zuckerman (living an acetic mountain life shared in reality by reclusive Roth) meets a young woman who excites sexual feelings that he’s by now incapable of consummating. The book’s style echoes this failure; unlike Portnoy’s The Monkey, whose filthy pillow talk and raunchy behavior are presented as real, the mild flirtations between he and Jamie Logan are imagined in a dialogue of Zuckerman’s creation. However, of the losses most deeply felt by the aged Zuckerman, the most poignant is his memory, which, in its fading, threatens to rob him of his gift with language, and thus his lifeblood. Clearly this is the end of Nathan Zuckerman – “Nothing is certain any longer except that this will likely be my last attempt to persist in groping for words to combine into the sentences and paragraphs of a book – but it’s less evident what this means, if anything, for Roth.

[Sophie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably one of my least favorite novels of Philip Roth. I think it's the Zuckerman thing. I preferred all of the Roth books, Plot Against America, American Pastoral, etc.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exit Ghost is a literary puzzle palace in which the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, struggles with his own ghost, the ghost of a writer he admired, E.I. Lonoff, and late in the book, the ghost of George Plimpton.

Perhaps the best line in the book has to do with describing fiction as rumination in narrative form...not as representation. Zuckerman, a writer, comes up with this line as he attempts to persuade a brassy litterateur named Kliman (recent Harvard grad in need of a subject) not to write a biography that borrows the theme of incest from Lonoff's unfinished novel and inserts it into Lonoff's life.

Complicating matters, Lonoff's elderly paramour, Amy Bellette, thinks she remembers Lonoff confessing incest with his elder half-sister, but Zuckerman tells her she's wrong. In fact, he says, Lonoff was riffing on the literary speculation surrounding Nathaniel Hawthorne and his sister.

Well, it's hard to say who's right. The fact is that Zuckerman is becoming elderly himself, has memory and urinary problems, is now contemplating leaving the Berkshires for a return to his old life in New York City, and has fallen in love with a young woman in such a way as to echo Lonoff's love affair with a much younger Bellette.

But Zuckerman, told by Kliman that his old friend George Plimpton has died, begins comparing himself to the totally realized person/writer Plimpton and crashes into the fact that he isn't much of a person anymore, just a writer, and a writer who is defenseless against the annoying predations of literary New York. He doesn't have, like Plimpton, a go-to persona that handles public stuff for him (Plimpton made a lot of hay pretending to be a bumbling athlete). He's just serious-minded Zuckerman in an old man's diaper, quite incapable of sexually consummating any relationship with a young woman. Time for the old ghost to exit.

This novel is written with Roth's typical clarity and economy. There are some male/female exchanges that strike me as a bit too cool and sophisticated for human life forms to generate, but the world Roth is describing...ahem, ruminating...is pretty rare stuff.

[Giada · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Il fantasma esce di scena" è un romanzo di Philip Roth del 2007 con protagonista il cosiddetto "alter ego" di Roth, Nathan Zuckerman.
È il 2004, sono passati tre anni dall'11 settembre e G. W. Bush ha appena vinto le elezioni per la seconda volta. Nathan Zuckerman ha settantuno anni, un cancro alla prostata lo ha reso impotente e incontinente e da più di un decennio si è isolato nella sua proprietà nei Berkshire, lontano da tutti e da tutto. Per seguire una nuova cura è costretto però a ritornare a New York, dove due diversi incontri gli scombussoleranno la vita. Il primo è quello con Amy Bellette, amante e compagna del grande scrittore E. I. Lonoff, che Zuckerman incontrò in una serata nevosa del 1956. L'altro è con la trentenne Jamie Logan, bellissima aspirante scrittrice che, insieme al marito, sta per scambiare casa per un anno proprio con Zuckerman.
In questo romanzo c'è molta riflessione sul passare del tempo, sul decadimento del corpo e sulla perdita di lucidità della mente. Si parla molto anche di letteratura e di scrittura, del rapporto tra l'autore in campo professionale e l'uomo in campo personale.
Inutile commentare Philip Roth. Il più grande scrittore americano contemporaneo.
"Morí come moriamo tutti: da volgari dilettanti."




Un post scrittum frivolo: con molta gratitudine ringrazio chi può indicarmi dove trovare "Il Teatro di Sabbath" e "L'umiliazione" in questa collana Einaudi🥹

[Shane · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book on aging, the unpleasant sides of it, and the urge of the human spirit to be young again despite infirmity and the looming prospect of insignificance and death.

An aging writer, Nathan Zukerman, Roth’s fictitious self, has retreated from the literary and celebrity world of New York into the mountains of New England, in the aftermath of death threats. Once safe in his hideout, cut off from TV, the Internet and other distractions, he is afflicted with prostate cancer which renders him impotent and incontinent. Returning to New York after a 11-year absence for experimental treatment that may restore bladder control, he is revisited with the joy of living again, especially when thrown into the company of a thirty year old writer and ardent fan, Jamie, and her husband, Billy, who want to do a house swap with him. What follows is a pathetic narrative of a man on the downward slope desperately trying to re-ascend an impossible mountain.

In New York, he also encounters Amy Bellete (a supposedly fictitious version of Ann Frank who survived the holocaust despite diaries to the contrary) who was the former lover of E.I. Lonoff (a fictitious fusion of Bernard Malamud and Henry Roth), the writer Zuckerman revered in his youth. Amy reflects his own failing body, for she is undergoing treatment for a brain tumour; she awakens Zukerman to the fact that he too is losing his memory, and with that, the only purpose left to him in life: his writing. The villain of the piece is the ambitious literary hound Kliman, the lover of Jamie and a reflection of the once bold Zuckerman, who is out to write a biographical exposé on Lonoff’s “dark secret.” Zuckerman, out of loyalty to Lonoff and a bruised ego due Jamie’s infidelity, is determined to thwart Kliman. The scene is set for a literary showdown.

And yet the book veers off into multiple directions after that brilliant set up and never gets to a satisfactory climax. We are treated to lengthy reflections by Zuckerman on the lives of Lonoff, George Plimpton and other literary greats, and to a take on Chekov’s story “He and She” in which Zuckerman conducts an intimate dialogue with Jamie, one he can never carry on in real life. Zuckerman (Roth) also gets to air his political preference for the Democrats and takes pot shots at George Bush on the eve of Dubya’s second term win. The biographer is cast as the villain by the writer who seeks to preserve his privacy, for “A biography is a patent on a life. The biographer holds the patent.”

This book is probably best read after reading The Ghostwriter in which a younger Zuckerman first comes into contact with Lonoff and Bellete and forms his life-long connection with them. There are references to that first meeting in Exit Ghost.

Roth seems to be trying to come to terms with his own mortality via the life of Zuckerman, and, in this book, boldly faces the embarrassments of memory loss, bladder loss and potency loss, aging factors that make men, especially celebrity figures like him, fall from great heights, leaving them the one exit left. Zuckerman takes his, but Roth spins it in such a way as to leave his fictional twin ready to return for yet another novel (or three) on the angst of the aging male animal.

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

With the election around the corner, Exit Ghost struck a nerve with me because it takes place in the weeks around the 2004 election - and in NYC, where the young characters are passionately hoping that Kerry will win.

Nathan Zuckerman is a renowned writer who has lived in isolation in nature for the last 11 years because he started getting death threats in NYC addressed: "Dear Jew Bastard." A prostate cancer survivor, he returns to New York in his 70s for treatment for his incontinence. He's swept back into modern life when he sees a woman he knew and admired as a young adult - she's now a senior as well, and has surgery scars on her once beautiful head. She was the mistress of a talented but forgotten writer, and an ambitious young biographer is hounding her for that writer's last, unpublished novel. Zuckerman also impulsively decides to swap homes with a young couple with literary aspirations, and his attraction to the young lady leads him to write a play called "He and She," based on imagined conversations between them.

There's a good deal of rumination on writing in the book; it reminds me of the way Ian McEwan did in Atonement - two masters of the craft who can't help but fixate on the written word.

"It was as though there were some color previously missing or withheld from our literary spectrum and Lonuff alone had it. Lonoff was that color..."

"I dialed her number as though it were a code to restoring the fullness that once encompassed us all; I dialed as though spinning a lifetime counterclockwise were an act as natural and ordinary as resetting the timer on the kitchen stove."

And something I hope to eventually achieve in election years (no luck yet!):

"...having lived enthralled by America for nearly three-quarters of a century, I had decided no longer to be overtaken every four years by the emotions of a child - the emotions of a child and the pain of an adult."

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is only my second Roth novel and my first of his Zuckerman series. Roth does not protect himself. He puts his guts on the page. I like that about him. Zuckerman has become impotent and incontinent and has been Thoreauing it in an isolated cabin when circumstances lead him back to New York City where he runs into his deceased writing mentor’s lover, now 70 something and with a brain tumor that disfigures her ancient face. She’s confused and rambling around in the past. He also meets a young couple who have advertised in the ‘New York Times Review of Books’. The wife, Jamie, catches his mind and his useless lust. He and the couple arrange to trade their homes for a year which gives Zuckerman an excuse to spend more time with Jamie. She introduces him to an obnoxious, Zuckerman wannabe, her ex-boyfriend. This near stalker wants to write an inflammatory biography of Zuckerman’s mentor. He and Zuckerman meet and scream abuse at one another. I’m not sure how he did it but Roth made me care very much for these less than attractive characters. I felt a well of compassion open for them.

[Dusty · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, I know Philip Roth is supposed to be the United States' greatest living novelist and therefore beyond reproach, but I really, really struggled with this book. Thankfully, it was brief (only 300 pages) and so throughout the slow, redundant first half of the book I could remind myself that the end wasn't really that far away. Maybe I'm just not the right audience for a Roth novel. I felt much of the time that I was being lectured to about literature (bad -- I wanted a novel, not a book of lit-crit) and the follies of youth (worse -- I'm still working hard at making my own youthful follies). Perhaps I should keep this book around and read it again in about fifty years when I will be in a better position to look back over my life and dwell on the botched opportunities.

Well-written book. Easily deserving of three stars. Not my favorite.

[adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every few years, grouchy old reclusive misanthrope Philip Roth emerges from his country home in Connecticut with a novel, like Moses at Mt. Sinai bearing the tablets to the Isrealites-no, wait, FUCK THAT, more like Prometheus descending from Mt. Olympus giving fire to the Greeks-and yet again he's done something really special. This book is so sad and so funny, it's maybe the best example yet of the author's famous mission statement: "Sheer playfulness and deadly seriousness are my two best friends". I think he's the best writer alive. May Mr. Roth live for another thirty years and write many more books.

[Susie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd give it more than five stars if I could. I love Roth, and this book is a distillation of all his classic themes. God, I love Roth. Nathan Zuckerman at 71, returning to New York City after self-exile of 11 years, trying to seduce a 20-something woman, while vowing to do evertyhing in his power to prevent E.I. Lonoff's biography from being written, while meeting with Lonoff's erstwhile young mistress now an old woman close to death, at the time of the Kerry/Bush election. It just has it all. I can't do it justice; I can only recommend it very highly.

[Kouki · Rating 4 out of 5]

C’était ma première expérience avec Philip Roth. Ce n'est ni son oeuvre la plus connue, ni l'histoire la plus originale qui soit, mais c’était étonnamment merveilleux à lire, un livre mélancolique et sarcastique mais tellement ancré dans la réalité que dans la fiction, le combat contre le vieillissement, la maladie, la mort et l'oubli ... vu par les yeux d'un écrivain aussi talentueux que Roth, que du bonheur!

[Kaloyana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Личи се, че Филип Рот е висока класа. Страхотен стил, много изчистен, без излишни глупости. Кратки, съществени изречения. Ерудит, с много за казване. Чете се бързо, но се замисляш над казаното. Историята сама по себе си не ме развълнува толкова много, но със сигурност започвам да чета други книги на Филип Рот, защото тази ме остави с усещането, че съм пропуснала важни книги от важен автор.