 First edition cover | |
| Author | Philip Roth |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
Publication date | September 2007 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 292 |
| ISBN | 0-618-91547-8 |
| OCLC | 144570543 |
| 813/.54 22 | |
| LC Class | PS3568.O855 E95 2007 |
Exit Ghost is a 2007 novel by Philip Roth. It is the ninth, and last, novel featuring his character Nathan Zuckerman. [1]
The plot centers on Zuckerman's return home to New York after eleven years in New England. The purpose of Zuckerman's journey, which he takes the week before the 2004 U.S. presidential election, is for him to undergo a medical procedure that might cure or reduce his incontinence. While in New York, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, whom he had last encountered during a visit to the writer E.I. Lonoff's house in December, 1956, as depicted in Roth's novel The Ghost Writer . Zuckerman also agrees to a housing swap with a young writing couple, Billy Davidoff and Jamie Logan, and quickly becomes attracted to Logan. In his hotel room at night, Zuckerman writes a play, He and She, composed of imagined conversations between him and Logan.
Through Davidoff and Logan, Zuckerman meets Richard Kliman, a young, brash Harvard graduate who is working on a biography of Lonoff. Kliman was Logan's boyfriend in college. Because of Kliman's zealous interest in a potentially scandalous secret from Lonoff's adolescence, neither Zuckerman nor Bellette wants to help him complete his project. Zuckerman may also be motivated by his own confused feelings about Logan and Kliman.
Although critics once considered that Lonoff, deceased and neglected, was modelled partly on the writer Bernard Malamud, [2] he now seems to be based on a number of writers. Henry Roth is a major influence, as becomes clear in Exit Ghost. Roth's biographer is Steven G. Kellman. It is known that Philip Roth has read the later novels of Henry Roth, though some of these remain unpublished. The rationale for Henry Roth is that in his novels published after his death he reveals that he had an incestuous affair with his sister when he was young; it also known that Henry Roth suffered from writer's block for much of his career after publishing Call It Sleep, his only major novel. In Exit Ghost it is revealed that Lonoff also had an incestuous affair with his sister – which led to his writer's block – and the fact that while content to teach in oblivion, he never published again.
American politics forms a backdrop to the novel. Zuckerman, Davidoff and Logan watch the results of the 2004 presidential election together. Logan, whose father always voted Republican, was enraged and devastated by the results. The older Zuckerman, though not pleased, was more philosophical and was able to place the results into a more historical context.
The stage direction, "exit ghost" appears in three of William Shakespeare's plays: Hamlet , Macbeth and Julius Caesar . In a BBC interview, Roth stated that using this direction as a title "came to me because of Macbeth. Last year in the summer I was going to see a production of Macbeth here in America, and I re-read the script that afternoon, and I came upon the Banquo scene, ghost scene, and it just leaped out – 'exit ghost' – and that's the title of my book, so I just lifted it." [3] In the novel Jamie and Billy read Macbeth aloud to each other, marveling grimly at its relevance to George W. Bush's first administration.
The title also refers to that of the first Zuckerman book, The Ghost Writer. At one point, Bellette says to Zuckerman that Lonoff (whom she imagines talking to her from beyond the grave) told her, "Reading/writing people, we are finished, we are ghosts witnessing the end of a literary era."
Critic Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times [4] called the novel "elegiac" and "a kind of valedictory bookend" to The Ghost Writer, adding "Mr. Roth has created a melancholy, if occasionally funny, meditation on aging, mortality, loneliness and the losses that come with the passage of time."
The Human Stain is a novel by Philip Roth, published May 5, 2000. The book is set in Western Massachusetts in the late 1990s. Its narrator is 65-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in several earlier Roth novels, including two books that form a loose trilogy with The Human Stain,American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998). Zuckerman acts largely as an observer as the complex story of the protagonist, Coleman Silk, a retired professor of classics, is slowly revealed.
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.
Nathan Zuckerman is a fictional character created by the writer Philip Roth, who uses him as his protagonist and narrator, a type of alter ego, in many of his novels.
American literature is literature written or produced in the United States and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature, but also includes literature produced in languages other than English.
American Pastoral is a Philip Roth novel published in 1997 concerning Seymour "Swede" Levov, a successful Jewish American businessman and former high school star athlete from Newark, New Jersey. Levov's happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk". It is the first in Roth's American Trilogy, followed by I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000).
Zuckerman Bound is a trilogy of novels by Philip Roth, originally published in 1985.
Sabbath's Theater is a novel by Philip Roth about the exploits of 64-year-old Mickey Sabbath. It won the 1995 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. The cover is a detail of Sailor and Girl (1925) by German painter Otto Dix.
The Ghost Writer is a 1979 novel by the American author Philip Roth. It is the first of Roth's novels narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, one of the author's putative fictional alter egos, and constitutes the first book in his Zuckerman Bound trilogy. The novel touches on themes common to many Roth works, including identity, the responsibilities of authors to their subjects, and the condition of Jews in America. Parts of the novel are a reprise of The Diary of Anne Frank.
Anatole Paul Broyard was an American writer, literary critic, and editor who wrote for The New York Times. In addition to his many reviews and columns, he published short stories, essays, and two books during his lifetime. His autobiographical works, Intoxicated by My Illness (1992) and Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir (1993), were published after his death.
Arthur Phillips is an American novelist. His books include Prague (2002), The Egyptologist (2004), Angelica (2007), The Song Is You (2009), The Tragedy of Arthur (2011), and The King at the Edge of the World (2020).
Michiko Kakutani is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for The New York Times from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998.
Henry Roth was an American novelist and short story writer who found success later in life after his 1934 novel Call It Sleep was reissued in paperback in 1964.
Larry Curtis Heinemann was an American novelist born and raised in Chicago. His published work – three novels and a memoir – is primarily concerned with the Vietnam War.
"The Middle Years" is a short story by Henry James, first published in Scribner's Magazine in 1893. The novelist in the tale speculates that he has spent his whole life learning how to write, so a second life would make sense, "to apply the lesson." Second lives aren't usually available, so the novelist says of himself and his fellow artists: "We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
Zuckerman Unbound is a 1981 novel by the American author Philip Roth.
The Anatomy Lesson is a 1983 novel by American author Philip Roth. It is the third novel from Roth to feature Nathan Zuckerman as the main character.
The Humbling is a novel by Philip Roth published in the fall of 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It is Roth's 30th book and concerns "an aging stage actor whose empty life is altered by a 'counterplot of unusual erotic desire'."
This is a bibliography of works by and about Philip Roth.
Benjamin Taylor is an American writer whose work has appeared in a number of publications including The Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire, Bookforum, BOMB, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, The Georgia Review, Raritan Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, Salmagundi, Provincetown Arts and The Reading Room. He is a founding member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty of The New School in New York City, and has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, Bennington College and Columbia University. He has served as Secretary of the Board of Trustees of PEN American Center, has been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and was awarded the Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger Residency at Yaddo. A Trustee of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Inc., he is also a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2012 - 2013. Taylor's biography of Marcel Proust, Proust: The Search, was published in October 2015 by Yale University Press as part of its newly launched Yale Jewish Lives series.
Omar El Akkad is an Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist, whose novel What Strange Paradise was the winner of the 2021 Giller Prize.