Our societal belief that past a certain age lust is unseemly is a means of protecting ourselves from an inconvenient truth: Desire persists even beyond the body’s ability to meet its physical demands. Yet the lust that figures in so many of Philip Roth’s novels was unseemly to his detractors long before Roth began to near age 70, the age of David Kepesh, the protagonist of “The Breast,” “The Professor of Desire” and the new “The Dying Animal.”
Throughout his career, Roth has refused to prettify lust, refused to deny the desire to possess and even to degrade that, he has insisted, cannot be separated from the male sexual psyche. In “The Dying Animal,” Kepesh, who is recalling an affair that began with his beautiful 24-year-old student Consuela when he was 62, remembers putting his penis in the young woman’s mouth and explains, “I was so bored, you see, by the mechanical blow jobs that, to shock her, I kept her fixed there, kept her steady by holding her hair, by turning a twist of hair in one hand and wrapping it around my fist like a thong, like a strap, like the reins that fasten to the bit of a bridle.” When he’s done, Kepesh and the young woman look each other “cold in the eye” and she snaps her teeth at him. His response to this threat of what she could have done and didn’t is: “at last the forthright, incisive, elemental response from the controlled classical beauty.”
It’s not a pleasant passage, and you can scarcely blame anyone, especially women, for being offended by it. But to raise the objection that it’s ugly or gives offense is to ignore the question of whether it’s true. And this, to me, is the fundamental gap that Roth’s recent work — the trilogy of “American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and “The Human Stain,” and now this controlled and ferocious coda to the Kepesh books — means to bridge: the chasm that has opened between what is acceptable and what is true.
I don’t think there’s any escaping that, on some level, Roth means to offend, means, like Kepesh with Consuela, to hold us down and put it to us. That isn’t to say that his writing is crude or abusive or that he’s just working us over; he’s too much of a craftsman, interested more in argument than in force. But if you are trying to break through niceties, if you are trying to identify the rapacious in the sexual, then perhaps you have to give offense before you can be heard.
For Kepesh sex is the truest connection. The lead-up to his first seduction of Consuela, when the two are talking about her life, about literature and painting, Kepesh calls “the comedy of creating a connection that is not the connection — that cannot begin to compete with the connection — created unartificially by lust.” He chats with this young woman about Kafka and Velázquez and wonders, “What does any of this have to do with her tits and her skin and the way she carries herself?” What may shock people most about Kepesh is the unmistakable element of worship in that question, and the seeming serenity that his pursuit of sex has brought him. In “The Professor of Desire” sex was a lurking beast ready to devour the stable life Kepesh had built for himself with his devoted, adoring mate. In another version of the ruthless self-invention that characterized every volume of Roth’s trilogy, Kepesh, in “The Dying Animal,” has long since identified (and expunged) the instincts toward marriage and family that he sees as the disruptive factors of life. He attends to his intellectual and carnal pursuits happily, with little room for regret.
Roth does nothing so conventional as use Kepesh’s choice to demonstrate how empty his life is. In one of the novel’s gutsiest moves, the son who despises Kepesh for leaving his mother is conducting his own affair with a younger woman. In “The Dying Animal” sex comes to swallow everyone who tries to deny its power, who has not, as Kepesh has, made some sacrificial offering.
But like most great writing about sex — Henry Miller’s is an exception — Roth’s is profoundly pessimistic. Kepesh can no more silence the instinct toward the companionship he has rejected than the conventional people he disdains can still their sexual urges. And even the sexual urge itself becomes enslaving for Kepesh. He’s so consumed with Consuela that the more she assents to him the more intimidated he becomes. He even drinks her menstrual blood and winds up feeling more at her mercy than ever. “The Dying Animal” becomes a turbulent demonstration of what it is to be caught between two mutually exclusive urges. And the fact that Roth has worked this territory before doesn’t make it any less urgent. In fact, it has never felt more urgent.
The key to the book lies in Kepesh’s memory of the ’60s on campus. What he remembers particularly is a clique of four young women, calling themselves the “Gutter Girls,” who took it upon themselves to become “the female trailblazers of a completely spontaneous sexual change.” They weren’t, he writes, “Bernadette Dohrn or Kathy Boudin. Nor were the Betty Friedans speaking to [them]. The Gutter Girls had no objection to the social or the political argument, but that was the other side of the decade.” Roth is trying to identify a largely overlooked strain of the ’60s that may be the truest. Not the flowery sentimentality of the time (you get the feeling his Gutter Girls may have listened to Donovan — but only because they dreamed about fucking him), and not what Kepesh calls “the communal righteousness.” Their cause was “the libertarianism extending orgiastic permission to the individual and opposed to the traditional interests of the community.”
What’s so bracing about this digression — it’s in many ways the heart of the book — is not just that Roth ennobles these girls’ erotic mission but that he makes you realize that the sexual questions the ’60s gave rise to have never been answered. The peace has never been made between romance and sex.
And so when Roth’s detractors accuse him, as seems inevitable, of telling the same old story, of whining once again about male sexual hunger, it’s important to say that the seemingly small story he is telling in this slender novel has larger resonances. It’s linked to an individualistic strand in American life that counters our liberal democracy in ways that have never been settled or smoothed over.
Some years ago I attended a show of late Picassos at London’s Tate Gallery in which Picasso returned again and again to the figures of the artist and his model. In this series the model’s voluptuousness mocked the old artist’s decrepitude; Picasso linked the artist’s declining sexual potency to the decline in his artistic powers. How, the young model’s very presence seemed to ask, can an old man like you ever hope to capture this? There was an element of frenzied self-loathing and unfunny comedy to the canvases — the artist as a dead-dicked Lear howling in the storm. In the climax of “The Dying Animal,” artist and model, voluptuous deity and ardent worshiper, meet on a level playing field, and the effect is sorrowful, appalling and moving. For Roth, the potency of art seems no less linked to the sexual drive than it did for Picasso. They are both a means of staving off death. The productivity and urgency of Roth’s work for the past decade stand alone in contemporary American fiction. This novel is clearly an attempt to get down what he knows about life and culture. But surely dispatches this urgent have rarely been so honed, so irreducible and hard, so compassionate and unforgiving. There isn’t an American writer working who can touch him.
A remark Philip Roth made in the Financial Times over the weekend has provoked much comment: “I’ve stopped reading fiction,” the 78-year-old author of “Portnoy’s Complaint” and dozens of other novels said. Roth isn’t alone; over the years, such writers as Cormac McCarthy, Will Self and William Gibson have made similar statements.
Some people don’t like fiction and never have. That’s quite different from having once read fiction avidly and then, in the fullness of time, giving it up. To judge informally (that is, according to what people tell me when they learn I’m a book reviewer), the latter is far from an uncommon experience. Many former devourers of novels haven’t stopped reading, they’ve just come, like Roth, to prefer nonfiction books on history, science or politics.
Roth, when pressed by his interlocutor, didn’t offer much of a reason for the change in his tastes: “I don’t know. I wised up …” he said rather enigmatically. It may be that he’s determined that reading other people’s novels impairs his ability to write his own. Most writers know what it’s like to fall under the sway of a master’s voice and to wind up unwillingly imitating it. Self told an interviewer that he couldn’t enjoy other authors’ fiction because “It uses the same muscles that I use to write with.” Still, it’s improbable that a writer with a voice as established as Roth would have this problem.
Perhaps, like McCarthy, Roth has simply lost interest. (McCarthy once said that he found reading fiction “a rather odd thing to do.”) Non-writers who have bailed on novels and short stories often say they’ve exhausted their patience for flagrantly “untrue” narratives. One blogger explained it thus: “I put it down to having experienced enough real life narrative and drama such that made-up stories no longer appeal.”
There’s a school of evolutionary anthropology that might agree with him. It speculates that fictional storytelling — a universal cultural practice — helps people imagine what others are thinking and feeling, and consequently how they might behave in the future. The value of such skills when it comes to navigating complex social groups is obvious, but perhaps people do reach a saturation point with age. No other artistic form can surpass the novel’s ability to immerse us in the inner life of another human being, yet there may come a stage when that prospect promises nothing new.
The literary journalist Sarah Weinman rose to Roth’s defense on Twitter, writing, “Actually, I am more surprised when 70-something writers read fiction. V. Rare.” Intrigued, I asked her to expand on this remark, and she told me, “To read fiction in particular is to engage with so many different creative senses, from being knocked out by a great writer’s examination of the human condition to marveling over linguistic style and voice to escapism and entertainment, or even all of the above. And as one gets older, and the ability to free up space in one’s head to properly engage with reading and not be distracted by physical and/or mental ailments, it seems to me that reading fiction would naturally become more difficult.”
Or maybe what some readers get sick of is introspection itself. The celebrated memoirist Diana Athill spent her working life reading as well as editing fiction, but wrote that in her 90s she had “gone off novels.” She blames this on the loss of a certain narcissistic taste that once dominated her reading. “Because a great many of today’s novels still focus on the love lives of the kind of women I see around me all the time, that means I am bored by a large proportion of available fiction,” she wrote in “Somewhere Towards the End.” I can sympathize. Once, the struggles of 25-year-olds to satisfactorily arrange their romantic lives was a fascinating topic to me. Now, not so much.
Of course, that’s only one kind of novel, in a world that offers many, many choices. It’s hard to muster the energy to explore new genres, however, when you’ve lost your faith. As champions of nonfiction often point out, whatever the literary shortcomings of any given work of nonfiction, at the very least you come away from it having learned something about the world. Fiction, however, doesn’t offer instruction or information; it offers an experience. And for that experience to occur, the reader has to deliver him- or herself up to the book.
This takes faith — belief that it can be done and trust that the author can do it. As Weinman suggests, you have to clear space in your head, like a party host pushing back the furniture, stocking up on drinks and hoping that everyone invited will come. If the gamble pays off, if the guests show up in a festive mood and hit it off with one another, you have a fabulous time. If the party never gels, all you have to show for your efforts are disappointment and embarrassment.
I don’t think fiction is harder to read than nonfiction — if anything, good fiction (make that the right fiction) is easier. But, as every reader can attest, opening a novel is a crap shoot. Depending on how new and untried the books you read are, the washouts are likely to outnumber the successes. For some older readers, summoning the optimistic energy required to give it yet another go despite these discouraging odds just doesn’t seem worth it. As Dr. Johnson said of second marriages, such efforts represent the triumph of hope over experience.
Yet others are still willing to try, like the late John Updike. “It frankly amazes me,” Weinman noted, “that he still reviewed younger writers for as long as he did.” I expect he threw some great parties, too.
Further reading
The original Financial Times interview with Philip Roth
Will Self tells the BBC that he doesn’t read fiction
The text of a 2007 Rolling Stone profile of Cormac McCarthy in which he describes reading fiction as “an odd thing to do.”
Readers of Mike Johnstone’s blog discuss their diminishing interest in fiction
Last week, Carmen Callil resigned as a judge for the Man Booker International Prize because she disagreed with the other two judges’ choice for the winner: Philip Roth. The prize, which is awarded every two years, commends a single author for a body of work making an “overall contribution to fiction on the world stage.” When she announced her departure, Callil was reported saying of Roth that she didn’t “rate him as a writer at all” and that “he goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book. It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.”
It took Callil a few days to present a fuller explanation. In the meantime, it was fascinating to watch various commenters respond to the kerfuffle. “I’m discouraged by what I assume is her ideologically inspired illiteracy,” Wendy Kaminer assumed for the Atlantic Online. “Is there a terrible scar of monotonous male sexuality in these inventions that limits their power or makes Roth deserve Callil’s dismissal?” fulminated Jonathan Jones in the Guardian. “To claim that,” he went on, “is to misunderstand what a novel is.” Eileen Battersby, in the Irish Times, sniffed, “The sexism and ego of Roth can certainly offend, and obviously bothers the irate Booker judge Carmen Callil.”
Not so obviously, in fact. Nothing in Callil’s initial statements about the affair indicated that her opposition to Roth’s work had anything to do with sexism or raunch. When she published a full account of her objections in the Guardian on Saturday, she expanded on a complaint that she’d mentioned from the start: Roth is the second North American (after Alice Munro) to receive the prize in its four-year history. Given that this variation on the Booker Prize is labeled “International,” and that it provides an additional grant that the winner may use to fund further English-language translations of his or her work, Callil had hoped that it would go to a less usual suspect.
She also doesn’t like Roth’s work very much, as she made abundantly clear. For the record, while I’m more or less in Callil’s camp when it comes to Roth’s fiction (particularly the face-sitting bit), her first remarks were thoughtless and high-handed. Perhaps Callil believed she was acting in the hallowed tradition of British literary prize judges who have aired their dirty laundry in the press, but insulting an author (any author) by name in such a context is uncalled for. There are enough readers who love Roth’s work to make him a reasonable choice for an important award, even if Callil can’t personally endorse that choice.
However, the really interesting aspect of the story is the straw woman erected by pro-Roth commenters like Kaminer, Jones and Battersby (among others) before Callil explained herself at length: the dour feminist scold who’s incapable of separating art from “ideology.” Instead, it turned out that Callil finds Roth’s fiction “narrow. Not in the Austen, Bellow or Updike sense, because they use a narrow canvas to convey the widest concepts and ideas. Roth digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there. His self-involvement and self-regard restrict him as a novelist.”
These are legitimate aesthetic reservations, even if not everyone agrees with them. Yet if you do agree with them, and you happen to be a woman, chances are excellent that — no matter what you say — Roth proponents will assume your aversion is based in politics. This is as frustrating as telling the chef you don’t care for lamb chops and getting a self-righteous lecture on his supplier’s humane farming practices.
As recently as 30 years ago, subjecting a work of art to a political litmus test — is it racist, sexist, classist, homophobic? — was considered the supreme critical method, but fortunately times have changed. Unfortunately, they have changed with a vengeance. Now, in many circles, critiques that can be labeled as “politically correct” can also be summarily dismissed as “not literary arguments but emotional or ideological ones,” to quote Kaminer.
Presumably, literary arguments can also sometimes be emotional and ideological (this one certainly is!), but the point seems to be that if you’re a female reader who hates Roth novels, you must be motivated by (irrational) passion and doctrinaire political animus, whether you realize it or not. Your taste could not possibly arise from anything but “illiteracy” and an inability to understand “what a novel is.” Patronizing? You bet. Why, it’s enough to turn a girl into a feminist.
Further reading
Judge withdraws over Philip Roth’s Booker win: The initial story in the Guardian
Wendy Kaminer’s appreciation of Philip Roth in the Atlantic Online
Jonathan Jones on why Philip Roth deserves the Man Booker International Prize
Eileen Battersby defends Philip Roth in the Irish Times
Carmen Callil on why she resigned from the Man Booker International panel
In “The Plot Against America,” Philip Roth imagined an alternative WW2-era USA in which President Charles Lindbergh launches a pogrom against Jewish citizens. In the author’s latest novel, “Indignation,”
he has imagined an alternative Philip Roth: a young Jewish man who leaves Newark, N.J., in 1951 not for literary glory, as Roth did, but for a series of zero-sum face-offs with the WASP power establishment. In each book, the message is the same: Assimilation may at any moment be reversed. If it can ever be achieved.
Marcus Messner has his own reason for assimilating: He’s still living at home, and his worrywart father is driving him crazy. “I had to get away,” Marcus says, “before I killed him.” So he transfers from the local university to Winesburg, a small liberal arts and engineering college in Ohio that bears little resemblance to Sherwood Anderson’s story collection and no resemblance at all to Newark. Boys toss footballs on expansive green lawns, and the frat houses have “massive black studded doors,” the better for excluding non-Christians. When Marcus takes a job pouring beer at the local inn, the local frat boys bellow: “Hey, Jew! Over here!”
On a campus that so prides itself on its sacred traditions, Jews have little hope of fighting their second-class status. But fight it Marcus does, in his stubborn and pugnacious way. He engages in a protracted battle with the dean over the university’s chapel requirement, and he refuses to do what the faculty or his peers expect of him, whether it’s getting drunk or joining a Jewish fraternity or trying out for the baseball team.
Marcus isn’t the only outsider at Winesburg, but, being a solitary cuss, he can’t make common cause with misfits like Bertram Flusser, a troubled young gay man whose oppositional stance is distilled in Malvolio’s exit line from “Twelfth Night”: “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!” And speaking of “Twelfth Night,” there’s a sad girl named Olivia, “an ex-teenage drunk and inmate of a psychiatric sanatorium who’d failed at suicide with a razor blade, a daughter of divorced parents, and a Gentile to boot.” Which makes her, by direct consequence, irresistible to someone like Marcus, especially when she proves to be more sexually experienced than he is. Soon, though, even this thread of happiness is jeopardized by the prevailing Midwest mores, and Marcus comes to realize he has exchanged his father’s stranglehold for Winesburg’s equally constricting rectitude, which is now “tyrannizing my life.”
“Indignation” is almost comically well-titled: It’s an angry little morality play about the harm men can do. Marcus comes to Winesburg trailing memories of his father’s kosher butcher store, where he used to watch the local shochet slit chickens’ throats and let the animals hang until the blood flowed out. (“It’s as if he took a bucket of blood, as if he took several buckets, and poured them out all at once, because that’s how fast blood gushes from the arteries onto the floor, a concrete floor with a drain in it. He stands there in boots, in blood up to his ankles despite the drain…”) But even within the pastoral confines of Winesburg, blood is never too far from the surface. In the hands of sexually repressed young men, a simple snowball fight can quickly segue into mayhem. “Within an hour, they were hurling at one another not just snowballs but beer cans whose contents they’d guzzled down while they fought. There were flecks of red blood in the clean snow from where some of them had been cut by flying debris … But their bleeding did nothing to dilute their ardor. The sight of their own blood in the white snow may even have been what provided the jolt to transform them from playful children recklessly delighting in the surprise of an unseasonable snowfall into a whooping army of mutineers…”
This violence echoes and prefigures the carnage happening overseas in Korea, where thousands of American soldiers are perishing in the name of anti-communism. It’s a dangerous world for a young Jewish man with no money and no connections. “Mark my words,” warns one of the Messners’ neighbors. “The world is waiting, it’s licking its chops, to take your boy away.” That terror infects even Marcus, whose obsessive devotion to academics is fueled by the knowledge that, if he’s expelled, he could likewise become bayonet fodder. Studying is nothing less than survival.
By design, “Indignation” is a slim and foreshortened volume, and critics are already assigning it to the shelf of “minor Roth,” maybe because its narrative freight is small in relation to its themes. But its emotional effect is by no means small. Early on, Roth springs a stunning twist on the reader — reminiscent of the switcheroo he pulled in “The Human Stain” — and the entire book is transformed into a meditation on loss and entropy, culminating in a superb set piece that gives full play to Winesburg’s pent-up demons.
Best of all, Roth has (for now, at least) abandoned the libido-in-winter theme that made some of his recent volumes a priapic chore. His ferocity, however, is undimmed as he takes up once more the conflict that has enlivened his work from the start: the unbridgeable divide between being a credit to one’s race and “an enemy of the Jews.” That last epithet was flung at both Roth and Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, whose own brother joined the attack in “Zuckerman Unbound”: “To you everything is disposable! Everything is exposable! Jewish morality, Jewish endurance, Jewish wisdom, Jewish families — everything is grist for your fun-machine.”
Well, Roth’s fun-machine has largely closed down, and on the evidence of both “Indignation” and “The Plot Against America,” he has begun to savor both the mixed and unmixed blessings of his upbringing. He can even allow the self-banished Marcus to reflect back on “those unimperiled, unchanging days when everybody felt safe and settled in his place.” It would be absurd to say Philip Roth has found religion; it would be equally absurd to say he’s immune to Marcus’ nostalgia for religion’s comforts.
In the end, Roth leaves it to Marcus’ mother to set him — and us — straight. “That old world is far, far away and everything in it is long gone. All that is left is the kosher meat. That’s enough. That suffices. It has to.”
Samuel Goldwyn Films / Joe Lederer
Ben Kingsley as David Kepesh and Penelope Cruz as Consuela Castillo in “Elegy.”
I’m finally dragging my ass to the task of writing about “Elegy,” a film adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel “The Dying Animal” that’s a curious hybrid indeed. It offers Ben Kingsley and Penélope Cruz in the best performances of their recent careers, as an older professor and his ex-student turned lover (and, as advertised, there are long, contemplative, art-history-lecture style shots of Cruz’s naked torso). This coupling is gracefully handled by Isabel Coixet (“The Secret Life of Words,” “My Life Without Me”), a Spanish filmmaker with an exquisite visual sensibility and a reverent, slightly over-precious approach to her craft.
Then there’s the screenplay by Nicholas Meyer, a Hollywood veteran whose career includes three “Star Trek” movies and a best-selling Sherlock Holmes novel, along with a previous Roth adaptation (“The Human Stain”). He sticks closely to the characters and story of “The Dying Animal,” arguably one of Roth’s bleakest and most misanthropic novels — until the end of the film, when Meyer cooks up a completely new, movieland-style denouement. The movie that results from blending all these ingredients, while excellent in many technical respects, is a muted, pretty, anesthetic concoction that’s never fully satisfying.
That said, the complementary but completely different performances by Kingsley and Cruz are worth seeing, and Coixet gets full credit for dragging both of them out of their comfort zones. As the 60ish cultural scholar David Kepesh, Kingsley has a fire and vivacity I haven’t detected in his recent roles since “Sexy Beast.” He can’t seem to play Americans without resorting to mannered, tic-laden performances like those in “The Wackness” and “You Kill Me,” but Kepesh (at least in his film incarnation) isn’t quite an American. He’s a suave, trans-Atlantic transplant, a British Jewish intellectual hardened to a point by his years in New York academia. He trades quips with Charlie Rose and presides, in lordly fashion, over graduate student gatherings.
It’s at one of these parties in his implausibly grand Manhattan apartment — OK, he’s sold some books and hosts a radio chat show, but still — that Kepesh makes his move on Consuela Castillo (Cruz), who’s just completed his class and is hence fair game. He likes her not just because she’s a smokin’ Latin bombshell but because her composure and affect identify her as a fellow outsider. She’s a Cuban immigrant from a conservative background who looks and dresses like a high-end legal secretary, which is what she was before deciding to pursue an academic career. Whether or not it’s because the director is a Spanish woman, this is Cruz’s breakthrough English-language performance. Consuela is a difficult character, both a sheltered flower and a confident intellectual, but Cruz anchors her in a soulful certainty.
Say whatever you want about the ickiness of the older man-younger woman dynamic, but it doesn’t seem mysterious that Consuela responds to Kepesh and even falls in love with him. He’s a cultured and worldly man, an intellectual mentor, and also a man who withholds himself emotionally, a conscious or unconscious tactic that, in movies as in life, tends to drive women nuts. It’s somewhat less clear precisely why Kepesh keeps excusing himself from dates with Consuela’s parents, never introduces her to his best friend — a Pulitzer-winning poet played delightfully by Dennis Hopper — and refuses to end his no-strings sexual relationship with a divorced friend (Patricia Clarkson). I suppose the murkiness is intentional, but it leaves the psychological center of the story uncertain.
Coixet’s individual images are marvelous constructions (as captured by cinematographer Jean-Claude Larrieu), and she frames the human face with a Bergmanesque intensity. But she’s such a fussy filmmaker, never using one shot when five will do, that I think she subtly exhausts the viewer and drains the picture of vitality. It’s a little like bombing through the Prado until your feet hurt, instead of taking your time and absorbing the work in a couple of galleries. Speaking of art museums and the female nudes often found therein, the already-famous lingering shots of Consuela’s breasts capture them as something akin to a wondrous work of Creation, but completely without prurience. Perhaps the feminist idea that the “female gaze” is intrinsically different is valid after all. Whether Coixet’s gaze is meant to capture Kepesh’s simultaneously lascivious and infantile obsession with Consuela’s poitrine or some objective, aesthetic perspective is once again not quite clear.
Between the marvelous lead performances and the arty, enervated feeling of the mise-en-scène, “Elegy” is already a mixed bag. But the filmmakers lack the courage to stick with Roth’s original gloomy conclusion, so while Consuela, Kepesh and the latter’s estranged son (Peter Sarsgaard) face the same crises as in “The Dying Animal,” the whole sour, Rothian mess of cowardice and mortality is finally wrapped in pink tissue paper and presented to us in a tasteful gift box. There’s an inordinate amount of talent on display in “Elegy,” but it ultimately reveals itself as an upper-middlebrow commercial concoction. It’s beautiful, but nobody involved was ever sure what the movie was actually about, or why they were making it.
“Elegy” is now playing in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities, with wider release to follow.
Thursday, Oct 4, 2007 11:13 AM UTC
Philip Roth's aging alter ego returns to New York to confront his unrealizable lust and his fear that "reading/writing people" may be finished.
By Brendan Bernhard
You don’t look to Philip Roth for the sentimental, and “Exit Ghost” — starting with its curt, dismissive title — is not what you would call a five-hanky farewell to the author’s celebrated character and alter ego, the novelist Nathan Zuckerman.
Reading the novel in a restaurant empty but for two young waitresses, I was almost embarrassed to be seen with it. Between the bleak title on the front (the word “exit” in red, as in a movie theater) and, especially, the photograph of the author on the back (steely eyes boring right through you, on through the human condition, and from there to parts unknown) — well, it just seemed so old school.
Although Zuckerman played a peripheral role in the acclaimed trilogy of novels Roth turned out at the end of the last century — “American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and “The Human Stain” — he has not taken center stage since 1986′s “The Counterlife.” “Exit Ghost” suggests that time has not just taken its customary toll on Zuckerman — it’s taken a great big whack. It has also removed his cancerous prostate, rendering this most priapic of novelists (in “The Anatomy Lesson,” he enjoyed no less than four mistresses) not only 100 percent impotent, but also incontinent. He wears absorbent padding in his underwear, and when he forgets to change it, he smells.
“I hadn’t been in New York in eleven years,” Zuckerman announces in the opening sentence of the novel, set during election week of 2004. “Other than for a surgery in Boston to remove a cancerous prostate, I’d hardly been off my rural mountain road in the Berkshires in those eleven years and, what’s more, had rarely looked at a newspaper or listened to the news since 9/11, three years back.” His pared-down existence, gradual accommodation to solitude, and his relationships with his few friends and neighbors are sparingly, but movingly, described. In some ways they are the best part of the book.
Yet Zuckerman is Manhattan-bound, to see a surgeon who holds out hope for a cure for his incontinence. The visit leads to two consequential encounters. The first is with Amy Bellette, the former mistress of his literary hero, E.I. Lonoff, both of whom appeared in Roth’s initial Zuckerman novel, “The Ghost Writer” (1979). Lonoff is long dead and Amy, with whom the young Zuckerman was smitten, has brain cancer.
The second encounter comes after Zuckerman picks up a copy of the New York Review of Books and sees an ad in the back that might have been written expressly for him: A couple, both writers, want to exchange their comfortable Upper West Side apartment for an isolated house in the country. Seized by hope that the surgery will be successful (though he feels certain it won’t be), and by a last-gasp bout of metropolitan nostalgia, Zuckerman calls the couple straightaway. Invited over, he falls instantly for the wife, Jamie Logan, a rich, sexy Texan in her early 30s who hails from Houston oil money, but is fiercely, at times hysterically, anti-Bush. (This is election week, remember.) It is her idea, not her husband Billy Davidoff’s, to leave the city. “We’re leaving,” she says stiffly, “because I don’t wish to be snuffed out in the name of Allah … Bin Laden dreams only of evil, and he calls that evil ‘New York.’”
Zuckerman is once more in the thick of political fever, has witnessed the return of his own impotent, unrealizable lust, is about to forge, through the ailing Amy Bellette, a renewed connection with the literary idol of his youth and is both rejuvenated and saddened by his own Rip Van Winkle fascination with what has become of New York in his 11-year absence. He focuses much of his attention on the emergence of cellphones, wondering “what had collapsed in people to make incessant talking into a telephone preferable to walking about under no one’s surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating the streets through one’s animal senses … For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous. And yet it seemed like a real tragedy, too.”
Roth’s Zuckerman tirades have generally been characterized as curmudgeonly, but that seems unduly harsh. “Tired” might be a better word, in that he contributes no fresh insights. But then, as someone coming across cellphones almost for the first time, at least as used en masse, perhaps it’s contextually appropriate that Zuckerman’s thoughts on the matter — the loss of interiority, the grotesque blurring of public and private behavior — are the same as ours once were, until we chose to shelve them. Still, it’s a shame he was unwilling or unable (failing literary powers being a prominent theme) to let fly with a truly coruscating satirical blast at what Time Out memorably called “New Dork City.”
Unfortunately, there’s a lot that’s tired about the book. The depiction of liberal New York’s grief following Bush’s reelection is like reading a novelized Frank Rich column, and even Frank Rich fans have read enough of those. Worse, great chunks of the narrative are broken off so that Roth can engage in an imaginary dialogue (a kind of play-within-the-novel, with sharklike erotic purpose) between Zuckerman and his busty Texan muse. Divided into sections baldly marked “He” and “She,” they do little to enliven Jamie the character — except for her top-notch breasts, she always seems blurry — and attest only to Zuckerman’s fierce, undying inquisitiveness: seduction by interrogation.
Nonetheless, this is a novel by Philip Roth, and there are gems, as in his description of Richard Kliman, a friend of Jamie’s who wants to write a biography of Lonoff, exposing his great “secret” — a three-year incestuous relationship with his older sister. Zuckerman loathes Kliman, who is young, virile and ambitious — everything Zuckerman once was — and enviously describes him as “savage with health and armed to the teeth with time.” The fact that you can see those teeth, time and armor in one, ready to chomp on rocks if need be, reminds you that Roth is still a great writer.
And what of “the writer”? If Zuckerman feels like a “ghost” preparing his exit, it is because he no longer feels relevant on either a personal or cultural level. Amy, who claims to be in communication with Lonoff in the afterlife, says she has received the following message from him: “Reading/writing people, we are finished, we are ghosts witnessing the end of the literary era.” As usual in Roth, there’s an alternative explanation: Since brain cancer has left Amy half-demented, that may just be her tumor talking. That Roth may not be as pessimistic about the literary future as Lonoff is also suggested by the fact that it’s Jamie, the young, contemporary writer, who, one page from the end, comes closest to summarizing everything that has come before. Chastizing Zuckerman for “having lost all sense of proportion” and acceding to “unreasonable wishes” when he asks her to visit him in his hotel room, she nonetheless admits that behaving unreasonably “is what it is to be in life, isn’t it? What it is to forge a life. You know your reason can reassert itself at any time — and if it does, there goes life and the stability that is life.”
It’s a bleak diagnosis. We can only be ourselves by not being ourselves, oscillating endlessly between sense and folly, never fully at home in either, until death ends the argument.
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Philip Roth
Cormac McCarthy, left, Philip Roth and Diana Athill (inset) 
Philip Roth and Carmen Callil (inset) 
