The last ordeal of Nathan Zuckerman, the indomitable literary
adventurer of Roth's nine Zuckerman books, like Rip Van Winkle
returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan
Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years
before. Alone on his New England ain, Zuckerman has been
nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats,
no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring
of old age.
Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three
connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is
with a young couple with whom, in a moment, he offers to
swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country
refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he
meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the
erotic challenge of the young woman, Jamie, whose allure draws
him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the
vibrant play of heart and body.
The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman's youth,
Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman's first literary
hero, E. I. Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman
depleted by illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere
American writer who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing
vocation.
The third connection is with Lonoff's would-be biographer, a
young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get
to Lonoff's "great secret." Suddenly involved, as he never wanted
or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire,
and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and
poignant possibilities.
Haunted by Roth's earlier work The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost is an
amazing leap into yet another phase in this great writer's
insatiable commitment to fiction.
Exit Zuckerman: Talking with Philip Roth
When we talked with Philip Roth for the Amazon Wire podcast, we
asked him about his long relationship with his fictional
surrogate, Nathan Zuckerman, his decision to bring Zuckerman back
(and say goodbye to him) in Exit Ghost, and the difficulties of
aging for novelists, and we managed to touch on George Plimpton,
Annie Dillard, Grace Paley, and The Tempest, along with nearly
all of the nine Zuckerman books. You can listen to interview in
the podcast above, or read the full transcript.
Zuckerman Returns to Manhattan: Philip Roth Reads from Exit
Ghost
When Nathan Zuckerman returns to Manhattan from his self-imposed
rural retreat for the first time in 11 years in Exit Ghost, what
does he find? Along with his surprising and unsettling encounters
with an aged and ill woman who had once been a young mystery to
him, an aggressive biographer who won't take no for an answer,
and an alluring young writer who tempts him back into the
adventure of seduction, he is confronted with a city whose
streets are filled with people behaving quite differently than a
decade before. "For one who frequently went without talking to
anyone for days at a time," he thinks. "I had to wonder what that
had previously held them up had collapsed in people to make
incessant talking into a telephone preferable to walking about
under no one's surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating
the street through one's animal senses and thinking the myriad
thoughts that the activities of a city inspire." Listen to Philip
Roth read an excerpt from Exit Ghost.
Looking Back on Zuckerman
The Ghost Writer: Introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a
budding writer who spends a night in the secluded New England
farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff, and meets a haunting young
woman whom he imagines could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi
persecution.
Zuckerman Unbound: Zuckerman, with newfound fame as a bestselling
author, ventures onto the streets of Manhattan in the final year
of the turbulent '60s, where he is assumed by fans and enemies to
be his own fictional satyr, Gilbert Carnovsky ("Hey, you do all
that stuff in that book?").
The Anatomy Lesson: At 40, Zuckerman comes down with a mysterious
affliction--pure pain, beginning in his neck and shoulders,
invading his torso, and taking possession of his spirit.
Zuckerman is unable to write a line, but the novel provides some
of the funniest and fiercest scenes in all of Roth's fiction.
The Prague Orgy: In quest of the unpublished manuscript of a
martyred Yiddish writer, Zuckerman travels to Soviet-occupied
Prague in the mid-1970s, where he discovers, among the oppressed
writers with whom he quickly becomes embroiled, an appealingly
perverse kind of heroism.
Zuckerman Bound: The latest in the Library of America's collected
Roth works brings together his first Zuckerman trilogy, The Ghost
Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, and The Anatomy Lesson, along with the
epilogue, The Prague Orgy.
The Counterlife: From New Jersey to England to the West Bank, the
characters in The Counterlife, illuminated by the skeptical,
enveloping intelligence of Nathan Zuckerman, are tempted
unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can
reverse their e.
American Pastoral: Swede Levov, legendary high-school athlete and
boyhood idol of Nathan Zuckerman, is wrenched overnight out of
the American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk
when his teenage daughter proves capable of an outlandishly
savage act of political terrorism.
I Married a Communist: The rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a big
American roughneck who becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, takes
the young Zuckerman under his wing, and is destroyed, as both a
performer and a man, in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s.
The Human Stain: Coleman Silk, an aging classics professor forced
to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist, has a
secret, kept for 50 years from all around him, including his
friend Nathan Zuckerman, who sets out to understand how this
ingeniously contrived life came unraveled.