Dave’s review of Exit Ghost (Complete Nathan Zuckerman, #9) > Likes and Comments

Prof. This guy knows how to write, doesn't he?

He does. One of the best on the planet. But he can be offensive, especially with respect to women. He's not an assaulter, he's just writing about a writer who desires women, is lifelong obsessed with it. It's fascinating to me, and often funny, and he's brutally honest and self-deprecating about it, and some people find him boring and one-note and offensive, and I get that. There are 31 novels. I have read (that I recall, at least) 14 of them, and some of them are the best novels of the twentieth century. His rep goes the way today of Hemingway, who is (also) seen as misogynistic, and there is a case for it for both of them, but I just don't see it that way generally. Now, Bukowski. . . also a writer of lust from an almost exclusively male perspective, he's funny, too, intentionally funnier, but also seen by many in some books as misogynistic. In a couple books I'd agree. But these guys write honestly, brutally, about men as, among other things, sexual animals. The thing is, I am also reading YA romances, romances generally this year, and comics with kick-ass girl characters, none of whom would put up with harassment. And then there are the lusty women of Bitch Planet and similar comics!

Well said, David. I'll throw Hemingway under the misogynist bus without hesitation. "The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is about as anti-woman as it gets.

I still think there's an irony implicit in the Zuckerman novels that redeems Roth himself, or at least that takes him out of the equation. For all the realism (as narrative method) in the Zuckerman universe, the characterizations are exaggerations. And I'd argue they tend to be exaggerations of Roth's own worst desires. To the degree that we can glimpse him at work, he's like someone staring into one of those mirrors with a spot on it for magnifying your pores, for taking blemishes and amplifying them into flaws.

It's been a few years now since I read Exit, Ghost -- and I thought then it was a bit of a decline from the extraordinary run that began with Operation Shylock and Sabbath's Theater -- but I think it may well be a book perfectly fit for this moment. What does it mean to desire, to be a body hungering for something in a world that's growing increasingly visual, increasingly a place that can feel like the projection of the self rather than what we once recognized as the real?

Take a step back, and the answer is obvious: grow up and deal with it. Amplify it in the context of a literary mirror that exaggerates everything, though, and it becomes more intriguing. This is the same territory as the late Yeats in the Byzantium poems, trying to distinguish between the body and the spirit when the body is a dying animal but the spirit is eternal. Yeats is too prim to say it, but the spirit is still horny, and that's where Roth kicks in.

It's all as miserable and as mockable as the situation of Death in Venice, yet it's all as magnificently human, too.

And you've done it to me again. Every time I see one of your excellent reviews of Roth, I say I'll just hit "like" and leave it at that. Then Goodreads takes me here, and I can't help myself.

Thanks for such a fine job.

Thanks, Joe, and you are right to mention Death in Venice and Yeats here, all relevant. Mockable, miserable and human, horny to the end. But--and I was struggling to say it--it's the spirit (Roth was an atheist, so he wouldn't say soul--urging himself forward as much as the shell of his body, to the end. And in the end, of course (well, maybe I should say), he finally succumbs (once more) to the inevitable, and exits.

And what you say so well, "Amplify it in the context of a literary mirror that exaggerates everything," that's the attraction, that he creates fiction out of his dying life, seen in a kind of tragic-comic funhouse mirror. He's good, as crude and stupid as he makes out Zuck to be in begging Jamie to leave her husband when he has nothing (physical, at least) to give her. And that's why he is good, the veil of societal niceties is off. Beautiful women have devastating power over Zuck, as always. He's howling like a hungry wolf to the end. Either that is interesting, and profoundly human . . . but to me it just is, flawed as he is.

And you know, Roth/Zuck rails about the declining rep of Hemingway in this book. He callas attention to some of the purest stories ever written now, dismissed because Hem was a womanizer. This is Roth also speaking to the literary public about himself as womanizer. Is the writing good? Increasingly, people say no, he needs to create real women, not just male fantasies, and this is something neither of them knew how to do well. And then the biography of Lonoff that Zuck wants to suppress or destroy: as with Henry Roth, Lonoff is discovered to have had a relationship with his half-sister when he was a kid; Zuck knows that this will destroy Lonoff's reputation and keep people from reading some amazing books. It's all the same question for Roth? If you don't like one aspect of a writer's life or work, is it right to dismiss all of it and say it all sucks? A parable for our time, indeed, and I'm not saying all of these cases are the same.

That is all so interesting. In the case of Hemingway, I still happily teach things like "The Killers," "Hills Like White Elephants," and "Big Two-Hearted River." I don't think they age at all.

I sometimes do share "Macomber" with students, but as I do so I'm not shy about revealing my own disdain for the story. I don't think the later failing (or even failed) work of a writer ought to undermine the excellence of what's there.

I never think of Roth as under too much risk for being dismissed for his gender politics, but he is seemingly very aware of his public reputation. Maybe he is agitated enough to defend his stand-in Zuckerman from charges that he sees as more threatening to his standing than I do.

Roth agrees with you, those stories are amazing. He doesn't agree with any notion of misogyny, re: himself or Hem. I looked at his wikipedia entry and it confirms my memory that--while much lauded--Roth has been denied accolades, and his few is that largely feminists are doing the denying. As he says to Jamie re: Lonoff. But Roth himself was not innocent of castigating his accusers. He was and is still hurt and enraged/bitter about various criticisms, from "self-hating Jew" (from the very start, with Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy) to misogyny. It's not like he expects a pass, though. He's a U of Chicago guy; he likes argument and every book features lively ones.