Death of an alter ego

Roth bids farewell to Zuckerman in angst-filled 'Exit'

John Dicker, Special To The Rocky

Published September 28, 2007 at midnight

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Philip Roth's last novel, Everyman, chronicled a man's descent into death after a life that taught him little about his nature. His new novel, Exit Ghost, is far sunnier: It's about a man's descent into old age, when everything he knows about his limitations is painfully reconfirmed through a spate of bad judgment.

Imagine if around, say, age 70, humans were compelled to relearn developmental lessons like "hot means hot" - an entire generation putting its finger to the frying pan. That's roughly the equivalent of Exit Ghost, the last great hurrah of Roth's famous alter ego Nathan Zuckerman.

The book is actually a bit more enjoyable, for Roth observers at least, than this glib characterization, but it certainly begs the question: Can we please get this novelist off his death trip?

Roth, the only living novelist to have his work collected by the American Library and winner of the Pulitzer, three PEN/Faulkners and enough lesser prizes to stock a dozen container ships, has produced some of his finest work in the past decade. From the complicated prison of race, class and political correctness in The Human Stain to the history-as-imagined- horror of The Plot Against America, Roth's last half-dozen novels have, in the mid-September of his years, become more pointed, more succinct, but without losing any of the delightful hostility of his earlier days.

But lately he seems content to pick (and pick!) at the scabs of his mortality.

The short synopsis of Exit Ghost is this: Nathan Zuckerman, having forsworn the life of a famous writer - teaching classes, giving interviews, having relationships - emerges from his decade-long self-exile in western Massachusetts. In part because of a series of threatening letters from an anonymous anti-Semite, Zuckerman had sought safety in the countryside during the 1990s. More than that, he aimed to wipe out all distractions from his work. He's succeeded in a big way: minimal social calls, no wife, no kids - just work. Even a friend's gift of two kittens is so unsettling to his literary output that he returns them after two days.

Of course, because this is a novel, our protagonist gives it one more go. Zuckerman may be a man of letters, but he's now a man of diapers as well. Left both incontinent and impotent by prostate surgery, he returns to Manhattan to see a urologist who, he's assured, can restore him to his previous state.

So intoxicating is this specter of hope that it opens the door to all sorts of previously abandoned yearnings - such as the prospect of an affair with a beautiful, decidedly unavailable and inappropriately aged woman, and vanquishing an oleaginous young biographer set on shoveling dirt on his longtime literary hero, the late E.I. Lonhoff.

A significant portion of the novel is written in the form of a play, imagined dialogue between Zuckerman and Jamie, the 30-year-old woman whose Upper West Side apartment he contemplates swapping for his Massachusetts home for a year. While the seduction is intriguing and perhaps even erotic, it quickly descends into something akin to intellectual masturbation as Zuckerman (and Roth, and the reader) knows it can't, and won't, go anywhere beyond tortured longing.

The most pleasurable moments in Exit Ghost are undoubtedly the ancillary riffs. So alluring is Roth's pitch for Zuckerman's willful retreat into political ignorance that it could function as some sort of Club Med for weary dissidents. Observe:

"The despising without remission that constitutes being a conscientious citizen in the reign of George W. Bush was not for one who had developed a strong interest in surviving as reasonably serene - and so I began to annihilate the abiding wish to find out. I canceled magazine subscriptions, stopped reading The Times, even stopped picking up the occasional copy of The Boston Globe when I went down to the general store."

After a few weeks, presto! A man confident in his newfound obliviousness: "I had banished my country, been myself banished from erotic contact with women, and was lost through battle fatigue to the world of love. I had issued an admonition. I was out from under my life and times."

Ultimately, Zuckerman proves nearly capable of living out his days as a literary anchorite. It's just that when a string of opportunities pop up in rapid succession, he can't resist - though he knows too well that his foray into the world he left behind is doomed to failure. And so it fails. Prostate be damned, he beats a path back to the Berkshires and the artificial barriers he erected 11 years ago.

Zuckerman was once Roth's sounding board for entertaining if indulgent ideas about a writer and his work. The character proved much more useful as a narrative conduit for the likes of Coleman Silk in The Human Stain and Swede Levov in American Pastoral. For that matter, the younger Zuckerman was an amazing witness to an imagined history in 2004's The Plot Against America.

So it's sad to bid the alter ego farewell, but it's good riddance to his graying anxiety. Zuckerman and Roth are at their best when looking backward. Now, both their futures are too preoccupied with crafting eulogies to manhood lost. That is, until Pfizer comes up with Viagra for the soul.

Exit Ghost

• By Philip Roth. Houghton Mifflin, $26.

• Grade: B

John Dicker is author of "The United States of Wal-Mart." He lives in Denver.

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