Exit Ghost was published a year or so ago, but I've been putting off reading it, while also knowing that it was inevitable that sooner or later I would find myself in the acerbic company of Nathan Zuckerman. Having followed Roth through the tumultuous years of The Human Stain, (a remarkably fine novel), the desire to know how Roth was to follow up overcame my reluctance to engage once more with characters I in no way find appealing but do find interesting.
In Exit Ghost, we find Zuckerman aged 70+, and returning to New York to receive treatment for incontinence. We read that he had exiled himself to a small house by a marsh for the last eleven years, and had cut himself off not only physically from his old life, but also going to the extent of cancelling his subscriptions to magazines and newspapers and only listening to the radio for its music.
In New York, the elderly author finds himself immediately sucked into the life of the city, reliving conflicts, relationships and literary controversies that were so much a part of his working life years before. This novel is primarily about aging, and Philip Roth from time to time quotes T S Eliots Little Gidding:
Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.
First, the cold friction of expiring sense
Without enchantment, offering no promise
But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit
As body and soul begin to fall asunder.
For while Zuckerman's mind and desires still seem to draw him back into his earlier life and activities, his body and brain sadly let him down at every stage, leaving only the "conscious impotence of rage at human folly", not least his own.
In fact, everything has crumbled. Zuckerman gets drawn into the possibility of a house exchange with a young couple who want to get away from the city for a year or so. He becomes sexually obsessed with the young woman, despite her obvious happiness with her husband, and his own post-prostate impotence and incontinence. He returns to his hotel after meeting her and writes down the imaginary conversations he would have had with her had his powers not deserted him, revealing that something of youthful desire lives on long after the physical capabilities of fulfilling them have long-since disappeared.
He is approached by the young biographer of a long-dead author who in Zuckerman's youth was his mentor, and finds himself outraged that the young writer is doing the usual digging around for human interest and hints of scandal rather than restricting himself to the literary development of Zuckerman's mentor. Zuckerman fails to see that what he loathes about the biographer Klinsman are precisely the traits which he himself carried in years gone by. The virility and agressiveness of Klinsman seems to bring out a passionate hatred and anger in Zuckerman which can only come from a man who is desparately rejecting the decay he is himself experiencing.
Exit Ghost is not a happy book. Zuckerman looks in as though through a cloudy window on a vibrant world of people forging their careers and reputations, one which gave him so much delight in his earlier years but from which he is now so sadly excluded. He seems unable to receive the consolation of later years when one is content to reflect on the past and enjoy the different pleasures which come from freedom from the constant striving which ambition brings.
Zuckerman is an immensely sad figure, adapted to his loneliness and isolation, but always aware that the smallest re-engagement with current literary life can start him off again, raging and arguing, fulfilling his craving for the admiration of men and the attentions of women. Complete withdrawal seems to be the only answer, but not a withdrawal to a comfortable life of peaceful satisfaction, but a sort of angry silence where the demons are held at bay only by constant self-denial of the things that provoke them.
A brilliant book of course, painful, difficult at times, even agonising but it would be a terrible shame to miss it. There is much more to this book that I have written here but am always conscious of the need not to spoil the book for other readers. The outlines of the story above are little more than can be found on the inside of the jacket.
