Exit Ghost is Roth's ninth novel featuring writer Nathan Zuckerman. Alas, this is the first one I've read, so I will have to find some time later to go back in time and read the others (including The Human Stain). Here, Zuckerman finds himself an elderly man, living in New England, removed from New York's post-9/11 world and on the brink of the 2004 election. Zuckerman returns to his hometown for surgery, but after a brief encounter with the former girlfriend of his now deceased friend, the short story writer E.I. Lonoff, he decides to swap his home for that of a young couple - both struggling themselves to make it in the literary world. Zuckerman falls for the wife, and becomes entangled with her ex-boyfriend, a young man who hopes to become Lonoff's biographer, and to reveal a shocking secret that Zuckerman simply cannot fathom. In an effort to work through his feelings over the wife, and Lonoff's ex, as well as the decline of his body due to age, Zuckerman takes to writing a play - the dialogue blurring his fantasy with reality. While I think going back and getting some background on Zuckerman from Roth's previous novels, I found this book easy to get in to and interesting as a character sketch about an aging individual who feels that he is slowly losing touch with the world around him - often by choice, but also because things are moving ahead much too quickly. I have yet to find a book by Roth that I've absolutely loved, but they all seem to have something intriguing that sticks with me for days after, and so I will keep plugging through until I've read all 25+.
Monday, December 1, 2008
Exit Ghost - Philip Roth
Exit Ghost is Roth's ninth novel featuring writer Nathan Zuckerman. Alas, this is the first one I've read, so I will have to find some time later to go back in time and read the others (including The Human Stain). Here, Zuckerman finds himself an elderly man, living in New England, removed from New York's post-9/11 world and on the brink of the 2004 election. Zuckerman returns to his hometown for surgery, but after a brief encounter with the former girlfriend of his now deceased friend, the short story writer E.I. Lonoff, he decides to swap his home for that of a young couple - both struggling themselves to make it in the literary world. Zuckerman falls for the wife, and becomes entangled with her ex-boyfriend, a young man who hopes to become Lonoff's biographer, and to reveal a shocking secret that Zuckerman simply cannot fathom. In an effort to work through his feelings over the wife, and Lonoff's ex, as well as the decline of his body due to age, Zuckerman takes to writing a play - the dialogue blurring his fantasy with reality. While I think going back and getting some background on Zuckerman from Roth's previous novels, I found this book easy to get in to and interesting as a character sketch about an aging individual who feels that he is slowly losing touch with the world around him - often by choice, but also because things are moving ahead much too quickly. I have yet to find a book by Roth that I've absolutely loved, but they all seem to have something intriguing that sticks with me for days after, and so I will keep plugging through until I've read all 25+.
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