Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

Junior year of college, I had an American Lit professor who seemed positively insane. He'd rant and rave about the inherent pornography of narrative, and tie everything somehow to sex and primal urges. On the morning of September 11, he kept us cooped up in the TV-less classroom, and railed for an hour about how we (as a generation) had been given an amazing historical opportunity. So yeah. Kinda nuts. But he taught me how to read literature in a much more mature way (my high school self never interpreted The Great Gatsby as a love story between Nick and Gatsby)--and he introduced me to the writing of Philip Roth, whom I've enjoyed quite a bit since that fall. Turns out the professor was a friend and editor of Roth's. After I read a few more of the books, Crazy American Lit Prof made a lot more sense. And I found myself thinking of him often as I read the latest (last?), Exit Ghost.

If Roth and the professor are correct, then life really does come down to the basest of human issues: sex drive and control over one's own body. Exit Ghost is a meditation on the end of both of those--and it's terrifying. It's pretty clearly the end of Nathan Zuckerman, the Roth alter ego from so many of this books. Zuckerman can't pee properly and can't get it up, thanks to a prostatectomy, and this isn't really a problem for him--until it is. The plot is set in motion by his emergence from his self-exile, when he leaves his Berkshires hideaway to get medical treatment in New York. The exhilaration of being back in his old city leads him to answer a home-swapping ad (which resolves my longstanding question of who responds to those strange ads in the back of NYROB); and he becomes involved with a young married couple who ignite his long-dormant alpha male urges. (Zuckerman wants to one-up him and possess her.) The infatuation gets out of hand extremely fast, and he struggles with his total impotence (both physical and game-wise, since he can't elicit more than mild curiosity out of young Jamie). Meanwhile, he's dealing with a minor literary scandal, as an old boyfriend of Jamie's is trying to publish an expose on Zuckerman's former mentor. That's when everything becomes a weird tangle of sublimated urges and frustration.

Roth creates a tangible sense of physical deterioration around Zuckerman, who obsesses over his own state. Zuckerman does it in a curiously detached way, though: while he talks almost incessantly about his incontinence and lack of libido, it takes 162 pages before the word "penis" even shows up. He can't face it directly, so he takes the literary route of describing the hell out of it. He also writes around it, creating a strange play of how things should have gone between himself and Jamie. Since seduction is the one thing he can't do, it becomes the charged focus of their fake flirtation. And it's incredibly sad. He gives "Jamie" all sorts of qualities and expressions he never sees in the real girl--qualities that are suspiciously like his dead mentor's young mistress, who made an incredible impression on him back in the 1950s. Said mistress comes back into Zuckerman's life as well, but as a flawed old woman. The parallel between then and now, as Zuckerman starts to disintegrate in every way possible, is painful to see, but pretty fascinating.

One might argue that this is Zuckerman's swan song, not necessarily Roth's...but the sense of finale is hard to ignore. Roth likes to do books in groups, or arcs--why not finish the same way? The Plot Against America was the end of youth. Everyman was the end of the man (no pun intended). And now Exit Ghost is the end of the creation. I think this might be it for him. There's a section where the line between Zuckerman and Roth becomes especially blurred, when Zuckerman talks about the death of George Plimpton, and the concurrent death of American literature. The parts where Zuckerman derides the upcoming generation of literati are extra steely and angry, even beyond the narrator's usual indignance. It's almost like Roth is daring the reader to compare character and author. Eerie, and yet fitting for a writer who has based so much of his career on daring people to look away--from sex, from class, from politics.

If he is going out, he's going out with some excellent, very Rothian writing. Some passages I liked especially:

"I started toward the subway to take a train downtown to Ground Zero. Begin there, where the biggest thing of all occured; but because I've withdrawn as witness and participant both, I never made it to the subway. That would have been wholly out of character for the character I'd become. Instead, after crossing the park, I found myself in the familiar rooms of the Metropolitan Museum, wiling away the afternoon like someone who had no catching up to do."

"To possess control over one's bladder--who among the whole and healthy ever considers the freedom that bestows or the anxious vulnerability its loss can impose on even the most confident among us? I who'd never thought along these lines before, who from the age of twelve was bent on singularity and welcomed whatever what was unusual in me--I could now be like everyone else.
As though the ever-hovering shadow of humiliation isn't, in fact, what binds one to everyone else."


"The light fading, the room getting smaller, a cab or two going by in the street, the city receding while everything around them becomes close and dark. These two people taking their time with each other, listening to each other. So sexual and so sad. Thick with each of their pasts, though neither knows much of the other's. The pace of it, all that silence and what might be in there. Each of them desperate for entirely different reasons."

"For this wholly unautobiographical writer, blessed with his genius for complete transformation, the choice was almost inevitable. It's what opened his predicament out for him and enabled him to leave the personal behind. Fiction for him was never representation. It was rumination in narrative form."