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.

“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa- aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa- aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa- aahhhh!!!!!”

Someone, I’m not sure who — it may have been Roth himself — defined the essence of his style by coining the word “diatribalist,” a nod to both his preoccupation with the Jewish experience in America and his characters’ fierce assertion of themselves. That word ought to find its way into Webster’s, with Roth’s picture next to it.

This being said, the striking thing about Roth’s new novel, “Everyman,” is that its unnamed main character has so little to tell us. He may be the least prolix hero, if “hero” is even the right word, of any Roth novel. Why? The answer can be found in an even more striking feature of the book, the proliferation of bodily misery that is its preoccupation. Roth could just as well have called the book “Every Malady.” In 180 slender pages, we encounter a hernia operation, a stomach surgery, a dead body washed up on a beach, a burst appendix, migraine headaches, another bad appendix, an open heart surgery, a renal artery angioplasty, a carotid endarterectomy, a silent heart attack, another angioplasty, the insertion of numerous heart stents and a cardiac defibrillator, a hip injury, brain cancer, a suicide, two strokes, a case of suicidal depression, a case of terminal cancer, and a death from more or less natural causes. And that’s just the first three-quarters of the book, before the focus turns to what we know is coming for the main character.

Roth has said that the opening of the novel, in which its main character is buried in the same cemetery as his parents, was inspired by the real-life funeral of his friend Saul Bellow: Roth came home from the ceremony, sat down to write the next day, and out came a fictional funeral. The rest of the novel circles back to the hero’s boyhood and brings us up to the moment of his death. We might be forgiven for hoping that, in Roth’s hands, such a structure would hint at an effort to plumb to its fullest the life we confront at its terminus in the very first pages. Not so this time. The life as Roth retells it is of little consequence; death and decay are his preoccupations. And while his jeremiad against mortality undoubtedly has a certain fierce power, it reduces its main character to not much more than a body that lives in fear of the end. Death’s wing touched him rather early: In the hospital for a hernia operation as a little boy, he watches as the doctors and nurses fuss over the boy in the bed next to his, watches as the boy’s father leaves at the end of visiting hours with tears running down his face. In the morning, when he wakes, the bed is empty; the boy is gone.

In “The Dying Animal,” Roth’s most recent stab at the novella, David Kepesh — the libidinous culture critic who appeared earlier in “The Professor of Desire” and “The Breast” — says in passing toward the end: “In every calm and reasonable person there is a second person scared witless about death, but for someone thirty-two the time between Now and Then is ordinarily so vast, so boundless, that it’s no more than maybe a couple of times a year, and then only for a moment or two and late at night, that one comes anywhere near encountering that second person and in the state of madness that is the second person’s life.” It’s as if Roth, having heard this from the mouth of Kepesh, has now decided to fully explore its implications in another novella that reads like a weird inverse companion piece to “The Dying Animal.” Indeed, we get almost nothing of Person No. 1 here, that dweller in daylight, vital and alive. Of his work life we learn nothing of note. Of his wives we learn mainly that he gave up his second for the pleasures of anal sex with a woman who became his third. Vast periods of contentment are dismissed in a sentence or two: “Twenty-two years passed. Twenty-two years of excellent health and the boundless self-assurance that flows from being fit — twenty-two years spared the adversary that is illness and the calamity that waits in the wings.” This is sandwiched between our hapless hero’s burst appendix in his 30s and his open heart surgery in his 50s. Later on, another nine years are dispatched even more summarily.

Intriguingly, Roth’s focus on “the state of madness that is the second person’s everyday life” is not the only connection that can be teased out between “Everyman” and “The Dying Animal.” Superficially, both are modest in length, and both appeared after much longer, much more political books (the latter after the postwar trilogy of “American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and “The Human Stain”; the former after “The Plot Against America”). Both are also more philosophical, essayistic even, than character-driven. (Speaking of which: Since when doesn’t a Roth character get a name? Only, I guess, when he stands in for us all.) Both fixate on an essential aspect of the human condition, one on sex, the other on death.

In fact, the harder one looks, the more our man in “Everyman” begins to look like the precise temperamental opposite of David Kepesh. Kepesh chose a life of culture; everyman chose a life of commerce, as an advertising guy. Kepesh revels in the freedom afforded him by the sexual revolution; everyman “would have given anything for his [first] marriage to have lasted a lifetime.” Kepesh is utterly without guilt or regret; next to his fear of death, guilt and regret are the dominant feature of everyman’s emotional life. Kepesh disdains the son who disdains him for his freedom; everyman’s two sons, bitter over his having divorced their mother, are among his most intense sources of remorse. Kepesh essentially offers us, in monologue form, a treatise on the pleasures available to the male body. Everyman thinks to himself that “should he ever write an autobiography, it would be called ‘The Life and Death of a Male Body,’” with the emphasis on death and those aspects of life that point toward it.

Instead of getting the autobiography, we get the biography, authored by Roth, and the biographer’s hands are all over it. As someone who grew up asthmatic and had knee and shoulder surgery before the age of 20, I’ve always been thankful the body’s memory of pain and suffering is so short. Not so for everyman: “He’d married three times, had mistresses and children and an interesting job where he’d been a success, but now eluding death seemed to have become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story.” One is forced to ask: So thinketh the character, or so sayeth the novelist? And if his job was so interesting, why do we get almost no exploration of it? Is this really what age has in store for us: “the process of becoming less and less … the aimless days and the uncertain nights and the impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing”?

It seems no accident on Roth’s part that the one vaguely heroic gesture in the novel is the suicide of a woman suffering from crippling back pain, a woman named Millicent Kramer whom everyman meets in a class he teaches on painting at his retirement community on the Jersey Shore. No impotence there. No waiting and waiting. If death haunts us from the shadows — the relentless message of the novel, greedy death salivating with his sword drawn — then Millicent at least had the courage to run to meet him. She even gets to have a name.

If all of this begins to seem less like what we expect from a Roth novel and more like a brief against our popular culture — with its glorification of youth and sex and its belief in the power of pills to save us from the inevitable — it also, in the end, basically confirms that culture’s underlying assumptions: Old age is hell. Only in youth is there unsullied dignity. Beyond a certain age, all that remains to talk about is a litany of medical infirmities. The one representative encounter between youth and old age in the novel occurs when everyman approaches a gorgeous young jogger on the beach near his retirement community. He brazenly hits on her, and she brazenly returns his attention. He gives her his number. She promises to call. And of course she doesn’t. She’s just playing with him, indulging him, and he feels spited: “when he took his walks he never saw her again. She must have decided to do her jogging along another stretch of the boardwalk, thereby thwarting his longing for the last great outburst of everything.”

“Old age isn’t a battle,” Roth writes, “it’s a massacre.” No doubt that’s one way of looking at it. But Roth repeats this assessment so many times, in so many ways, that it begins to sound a little overinsistent. It’s hard not to be reminded of something James Baldwin once wrote about the art of the novel, mainly because Roth so vigorously defies it. “No reader will believe you if you simply tell him what you want him to know,” Baldwin said. “You must make him see it for himself. He must somehow be trapped into the reality you want him to submit to and you must achieve a kind of rigorous discipline in order to walk the reader to the guillotine without his knowing it.”

Roth, the eager executioner, has certainly walked us to the guillotine; the entire arc of the novel is one long death march. But we are mere spectators, strangers gathered at a public execution. The guillotine’s blade, which Baldwin meant to fall on the reader, in this case falls on the character. Yet we’ve learned very little worth knowing of the condemned man, except that his crime was to be born human. We’re supposed to be mortified by the spectacle of his bodily undoing, but there was never even a moment of surprise, since he was buried in the opening scene. Roth seems to hope that by unremittingly exploring the fragility of the human body, we will feel the cut of the guillotine’s blade too. It’s as if Roth has cooked up a fictional equivalent to the show trials of the last century: a novel that serves, as much as anything, as a warning to the rest of us.