Philip Roth’s latest novel, Exit Ghost, is a book written by a literary geek, for an audience of literary geeks, about the sordid lives of other, fictional literary geeks. Reacquainting a cast of characters from his 1979 novel The Ghost Writer, Roth finds his protagonist Nathan Zuckerman returning to New York after an 11-year absence in New England. Nathan quickly becomes involved in a dispute over the publication of a controversial biography of his deceased mentor, E. I. Lonoff.
Near the novel’s end, Zuckerman describes Lonoff’s artistry as a “rumination in narrative form.” This description could easily apply to Roth’s own technique. The narrative is slight, but the book’s conflicts and characters are constructed in such a way that they intricately reveal the novel’s questions. Roth succeeds by having his novel connect with the themes and storylines he first presented in these other Zuckerman books. Ideas and plots are resurrected and then cast in a new, intriguing light.
Exit Ghost’s most prolonged intertextual resonance is with The Ghost Writer. In that book, Zuckerman narrates the history of Lonoff’s lover, Bellette, imagining she is the author of a book popular because the public believes its author to be dead. Bellette therefore must not reveal that she is alive—outrageous consequences follow.
In Exit Ghost, Lonoff’s biographer— a brash jerk from Harvard— reveals to Zuckerman that he has discovered a long-buried secret from Lonoff’s past. The biographer hopes that by publishing this secret, all of Lonoff’s writing will be reappraised by the literary community that has forgotten him.
The book’s characters seem to argue that a work of literature can only be understood through acquiring total knowledge of the author’s life. The major irony of Roth’s last Zuckerman novel—which was preoccupied with the author’s relation to his text—is that the correspondences Roth creates between Exit Ghost and the other Zuckerman books, especially The Ghost Writer, convince the reader of the fictionality of a literary work many consider to be a veiled autobiography of Roth himself.
Of course, the book is not so unequivocal. When Zuckerman reads a letter Bellette has written to the New York Times arguing against the biographical interpretation of Ernest Hemingway’s stories, he recognizes that she is motivated by her time with Lonoff. Is this Roth’s subversion of the book’s argument?
