2007 It was some time around – or shortly before – his 74th birthday that Philip Roth decided to dispense with his alter ego – not kill him off, because you never know when he’ll come in handy again – but at least stop using him as a stand-in for his own anxieties, fantasies, obsessions and paranoia. Exit Ghost, which came out later that year and deftly takes its title from a stage direction in Macbeth, is supposed to be our last sight of Nathan Zuckerman, who first strode the boards in Roth’s The Ghost Writer (1979).
Latterly – as in American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000) – Roth had taken to using Zuckerman as a (never quite neutral) narrator of stories whose interest lay beyond him. But in Exit Ghost Zuckerman returns to the centre; the book is about him – just as were The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound (1981) and The Anatomy Lesson (1983).
Those books can best be understood as Roth’s ways of dealing with the reaction to his smash hit, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), another American good-bad boy story (see 16 July), about an adolescent’s raging hormones struggling against the taboos of a Jewish upbringing in Newark, New Jersey. Amid high praise, the book also came in for a lot of criticism for its satire on Jewish social aspirations and matriarchal family politics.
Through Zuckerman in The Ghost Writer Roth could unmake his recent notoriety and sudden fame to revert to a version of his younger self, the earnest, high-minded author of a handful of short stories, who idolises the reclusive E.I. Lonoff as a father to his talent, and fantasises that Amy Bellette, the great author’s mysterious young mistress, is Anne Frank, somehow preserved from the Holocaust, who – when she marries him, as of course she must – will absolve him from imputations of anti-Semitism. The whole construction is so improbable, and in such bad taste (while also being so very funny), that of course it had to be the work of Zuckerman’s fevered imagination, not Roth’s. Zuckerman Unbound deals directly with the post-Portnoy furore, by liberating a degree of comically excessive bad temper in Zuckerman from which a more discreet Roth might want to hold back.
Half a century on, and if Roth feels his age, he wants Zuckerman to be its outward show. Still impotent and incontinent from an old prostatectomy, Zuckerman returns to New York for medical treatment to stop the leakage. Arranging to swap his house in the Berkshires (not unlike Lonoff’s of long ago) with a young couple who write, he falls in love with the woman, returning to his hotel, until they vacate their apartment, to write a one-act drama called ‘He and She’, to the backdrop of Strauss’s Four Last Songs. He has already run into Amy Bellette, now impoverished, emaciated and dying of brain cancer. Meanwhile, a brash young Harvard man called Kliman from (God forbid) Los Angeles is hot on the trail of a long-suppressed sexual secret involving the long-deceased Lonoff. Cheerful it’s not, if mordantly funny in parts. For Zuckerman (and Roth?) the worst memento mori is not the impotence and incontinence but the thought that a Kilman may come after him/them one day.