Zuckerman abandona el silencio y la quietud de su carretera rural de montaña en los Berkshires para someterse en Nueva York a una intervención quirúrgica que podría ayudarle a controlar su incontinencia, producto de la extirpación de su próstata cancerosa hace once años. Durante más de una década se ha mantenido escribiendo en el aislamiento, “había dejado de habitar no solo el gran mundo, sino también el momento presente. Mucho tiempo atrás había aniquilado el impulso de estar en él y formar parte de él”, lejos de cualquier avatar y compromiso social, viviendo exclusivamente para la literatura, releyendo a los clásicos que lo encandilaron en su juventud y siguiendo la ética de trabajo de su antiguo maestro I. E. Lonoff. La ciudad es la misma pero hay espacios cuya arquitectura colisiona con la memoria cuando no coinciden. Zuckerman no está al tanto de la contienda electoral de 2004, aun así hace patente su aversión a la administración Bush y a lo que el partido republicano representa para sus propias convicciones. Mientras más se sumerge en el ambiente citadino aumenta la consciencia de su desconexión con el entorno en el que alguna vez se movía con libertad. Nathan Zuckerman ya no pertenece al ahora. “Todo lo que la ciudad podría añadir era lo que había decidido que ya no me servía de nada: Aquí y Ahora”. Sin embargo, el influjo de la ciudad empieza a obrar en Nathan el “despertar de las posibilidades”, la precipitación de sus actos se va apoderando de su voluntad. Es la esperanza resurgida que en el campo no tenía nada que la tentara.Conoce a un matrimonio joven de escritores que busca intercambiar viviendas, así él podrá quedarse durante un año en el departamento de ellos en Nueva York, mientras David y Jamie se van a su cabaña de los Berkshires. Se encuentra con Amy Bellette, a la que conoció y vio por única vez en 1956 cuando Zuckerman se quedó una noche en casa de I. E. Lonoff., ahora decrépita, enferma y empobrecida, la mujer que pasó junto a Lonoff los últimos cinco años de su vida hasta que éste falleció sin acabar su primera novela después de una fecunda y brillante carrera como escritor de relatos cortos. Por último tenemos a Richard Kliman, amigo del joven matrimonio que está empecinado en escribir una escandalosa biografía de Lonoff para así “restituirle” su lugar en las letras norteamericanas. Zuckerman descubre que la vejez no lo exime de los dramas de la juventud, sus sentimientos por la joven Jamie lo asedian y no tiene otro camino que la ficción para darle una vía de escape a sus emociones. La ficción como probabilidad, la ficción como el camino que quisiera tomar en la realidad, una realidad esquiva cuyas circunstancias frenan las posibilidades del deseo. Zuckerman empieza a escribir los diálogos de una obra, los personajes no tienen nombre son sólo Él y Ella.Conocemos, entre otras cosas, los motivos que tuvo Zuckerman en su momento para huir de la ciudad, que tienen cierta similitud con el motivo que empuja al joven matrimonio. El personaje de Kliman representa el empecinamiento de descubrir las vidas de los autores en supuestas claves escondidas en sus obras, su celo lo lleva a imaginar y creer —según Zuckerman, que narra la historia en primera persona— que Lonoff no publicó su novela porque en ella estaba el grande y terrible secreto que había marcado su derrotero como artista. El autor (Zuckerman, no Roth) hace también una comparación entre su propia vida y la de su fallecido amigo, George Plimpton, que de alguna manera era su propia antítesis.Los grandes temas que preocupaban a Zuckerman cuando estaba en contacto con el mundo —y de los que podemos leer en los otros libros de Philip Roth que éste protagoniza— han desaparecido. El fuego interior, las pulsiones más poderosas de su espíritu literario se han disipado. Zuckerman encara el mundo como algo lejano y perdido y su estadía en Nueva York durante algo más de una semana es sencillamente “el implacable encuentro entre los ‘ya no’ y los ‘todavía no’ ”. Su único refugio es la ficción y hasta su capacidad para escribirla está menguando con los años. Nathan se ha convertido en un fantasma. Un espectro que sale, que como en Hamlet, se va, se desvanece… para siempre.Philip Roth nos entrega en esta novela —con una prosa impecable y el genial estilo de su narrativa— la incierta despedida de uno de sus personajes emblemáticos. Una reflexión no sólo sobre la vejez y sus impedimentos, sino también sobre el tiempo, que en determinado momento deja de pertenecernos. Estamos aquí, pero nosotros nos vamos y el tiempo ya no es nuestro, es de ellos, de los que vienen. Sin embargo, seguimos presentes, testigos de nuestra propia desintegración.
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!
What do You think about Exit Ghost (2007)?
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.
—adam
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.
—Shane
I never read Philip Roth. I thought he was a "man's" writer and, from the discussions I heard, that he wrote mostly about the fact that young men want to have sex all the time. Which is really not nearly as interesting as young men think it is. But I picked up this book recently and read it one day, could not put it down. It is the most recent, maybe last book about Roth's protagonist Nathan Zuckerman who the public probably thinks is Roth's alter-ego. I loved this book. Maybe it was a man's book. It certainly deals with some issues unique to men -- prostrate cancer, for example. But it also is about aging, about our bodies betraying us over time, about changes, about decisions made without much thoughts which can turn out to have enormous significance in people's lives.Loved the book. Now I'm going to go back and get all the books about this character, start from the beginning.
—Nancy
