Fiction:It has never been easy being Philip Roth's literary alter ego. All that ambition, all that rage, all the Jewishness - not forgetting the sex, the frenzy, the chaos, the guilt and the persistent theme of flight from pretty much everything including himself, writes Eileen Battersby.
Poor Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's famous Jewish writer/Doppelgänger at large, probably deserves a medal for surviving nine books. If as the title suggests that Exit Ghost is to be the last we will see of Nathan Zuckerman, he deserves a better swan song than this disappointingly hasty performance which draws too much of its substance from an earlier, far superior work.
Exit Ghost, with its cast of ghosts, begins with more than a hint of dark reflection: "I hadn't been in New York in 11 years. Other than for surgery in Boston to remove a cancerous prostate, I'd hardly been off my rural mountain road in the Berkshires in those 11 years and, what's more, had rarely looked at a newspaper or listened to the news since 9/11 . . ." Zuckerman in retreat from "the great world" and "the present moment" is the theme.
From the outset, it seems obvious that Roth is not exactly preparing us for a comic extravaganza. Zuckerman is on his way to New York to seek a cure for his incontinence. His operation may have saved his life but it has also ruined it, leaving him too self conscious to even swim in a pubic pool lest he leave a trail of urine floating on the water. An injection of collagen into the neck of the bladder may help, but Zuckerman is not all that hopeful.
There is a bluntness about the narrative, not that explicit candour is anything new to Roth. But there is also despair, the despair of simply going through the pattern of the familiar which has become little more than a burden. A writer writing because he has to. The hectic life of the writer, balancing the demands of publicity, book tours, interviews and lectures with the need for the time to produce the work that fuels the entire circus, has been replaced by monastic solitude.
Neither Roth nor Nathan Zuckerman are in any mood for jokes. "I'd been alone these past 11 years in a small house on a dirt road in the deep country, having decided to live apart like that some two years before the cancer was diagnosed. I see few people. Since the death, a year earlier, of my neighbour and friend Larry Hollis, two, three days can go by when I speak to no one but the housekeeper who comes to clean each week and her husband, who is my caretaker."
It is grim, a bleak monologue providing a detailed account of the ravages of age, of how an individual withdraws, how a life winds down into a series of conclusions. "I don't go to dinner parties, I don't go to the movies, I don't watch television, I don't own a cell phone or a VCR or a DVD player or a computer. I continue to live in the Age of the Typewriter and have no idea what the World Wide Web is. I no longer bother to vote. I write for most of the day and often into the night. I read, mainly the books that I first discovered as a student . . ." Beyond the despair, there is also a hint of defiance as well as anger.
IT IS AS if Roth has pushed Zuckerman aside and has decided to describe his life. This should not present much of a problem; after all, Roth's greatest source of material as a novelist has always been himself - his ego, his angst, his ambition, his energy. But Exit Ghost consistently steps beyond fiction; it labours under the weight of bitter experience in an uncomfortable way.
Instead of conferring authenticity and conviction, it simply makes it awkward. A reader should not have to continually remind themselves that this is supposed to be Nathan Zuckerman speaking, not his creator.
Roth does not spare the details when it comes to incontinence, and even includes the rubber pads. It is not the first time for Roth to write so explicitly about physical decline. Long before the publication of Everyman last year, he had written so movingly and graphically of his father's heroic battle which became a tragic humiliating slide into death by deconstruction. Patrimony, which was published in 1991, is subtitled "a true story" and true it is. It is also a shocking and affecting book.
Even at his most brash - and brash immaturity was long a hallmark of his exuberant fiction - Roth has always had two strengths: his humour and his humanity. As the years have passed and the books multiplied, his humanity has begun to dominate. In 1997, American Pastoral heralded the belated maturing of Roth. It consolidated the achievement of The Counterlife (1987), which remains one of his finest works - and it featured Zuckerman at his most satisfyingly complex.
American Pastoral is a major novel; it also marks the defining moment when Roth grew up and looked beyond himself to his country. The narrative, again featuring Zuckerman but this time as a witness instead of self-absorbed monologist, develops into an elegy for America. Roth sustained this approach through subsequent large-canvas Zuckerman novels, I Married A Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000), as well as his historical novel, The Plot Against America (2004) and Everyman (2006) - a very human book. But with Exit Ghost, it is back to the worst excesses of his mid-period and unconvincingly sexualised novels, such as Deception (1992).
As early as page 17 in Exit Ghost, the warning bells are sounding. Zuckerman arrives at the doctor's office and notices another patient, a frail, elderly woman. "I took a second look, wondering whether she was someone I'd once known . . . I know that voice . . . I know the accent. I know the woman . . . I did indeed know her." On following her to a diner, he then delivers the facts; "Her name was Amy Bellette. I'd met her only once. I'd never forgotten her."
From this point on, Exit Ghost becomes an academic exercise for the reader. The narrative develops into a shaky sequence of recalling scenes from his entertaining and stylish scene-setter, The Ghost Writer (1979), in which the young Zuckerman - ably aided and abetted by a younger Roth - first emerged as the aspiring author of four short stories who sees and immediately lusts after the youthful Amy Bellette.
Roth's prose at its best is always a wonder; it balances the conversational with the formal and a relaxed rhythmic grace. The Ghost Writer shows not only how well and how easily Roth can write, but also how frantically funny he can be.
In The Ghost Writer, the young disciple has come to worship at the feet of one of his heroes, a forgotten master called Lonoff who then lived - as Zuckerman and Roth now do - on a mountain. The young Zuckerman harboured no heroic self-delusions and recalls having sent Lonoff a letter "telling him how much he had meant to me . . . in the same breath I mentioned coming upon his 'kinsmen' Chekhov and Gogol and went on to reveal in other unmistakable ways just how serious a literary fellow I was - and, hand in hand with that, how young. But then nothing I had ever written put me in such a sweat as that letter. Everything undeniably true struck me as transparently false as soon as I wrote it down, and the greater the effort to be sincere, the worse it went. I finally sent him the tenth draft and then tried to stick my arm down the throat of the mailbox to extract it."
Later in Lonoff's home, young Zuckerman sees a girl, Amy Bellette, whom he assumes to be the famous writer's teenage daughter. Zuckerman immediately sees himself married to her, "the infanta", and "living in a little farmhouse of our own not that far away".
Meanwhile the famous writer's wife appears to be going through a nervous breakdown and it turns out that the infanta is in fact Lonoff's mistress and that the famous writer is about to leave home with her. It is brilliantly handled by Roth at his best. Exit Ghost - flash forward Nathan Zuckerman 50 years - is not only a feeble revisit of that earlier book, it also looks to the sexual dialogues which dominated Deception, one of his most unconvincing books.
YET WHATEVER ABOUT pale returns to previous books, the ultimate weakness of Exit Ghost is that it collapses on its central plot, which consists of the reclusive Zuckerman, incontinent and impotent, becoming obsessed with a ridiculously underwritten if obnoxiously knowing adored wife of a besotted idiot husband. She is capable of reporting: "My me-ness is his magnetic pole" and that "His praise for my silhouette is unstinting when I'm backlit in the bedroom." Not even Woody Allen would have created such a humourless femme fatale.
The chance answering of a house swap add has led Zuckerman to the apartment owned by this couple who are anxious to leave New York for a while. On the sideline is a rapacious young man intent on writing a biography of, you've guessed it - Lonoff - and surprise, surprise, the would-be biographer's lover is none other than the adored wife of the besotted idiot husband?
It is ironic that having recently written some of his finest novels, Roth should dispatch one as ill conceived and randomly written as this. There are flashes of poignancy, however, such as when Zuckerman realises that he, as an ailing old man, is "back on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, not many blocks from where I'd once lived as a vigorous, healthy younger man". But it is lost amid the wandering and repetition, and the echoes of better books. Somewhere in between the memories and the futile sexual bantering, a tribute to George Plimpton surfaces for no apparent reason.
Illness, age, memory loss, the past, sex and dying are the big themes and Roth has used them all well in previous books but, with the exception of memory loss, not here.
As for Zuckerman, John Updike has served Rabbit far better and far more convincingly.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
If this is the end of Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth could have given his alter ego a more fitting swan song Exit Ghost By Philip Roth Jonathan Cape, 292 pp, £16.99