Exit Ghost

Philip Roth, Roth, Philip

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9780547345338
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age.

Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jamie, whose allure draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body.

The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman’s youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman’s first literary hero, E. I. Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman depleted by illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere American writer who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing vocation.

The third connection is with Lonoff’s would-be biographer, a young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff’s “great secret.” Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.

Haunted by Roth’s earlier work The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost is an amazing leap into yet another phase in this great writer’s insatiable commitment to fiction.

2

Under the Spell

ON THE WALK from my hotel up to West 71st Street I stopped at a liquor store to buy a couple of bottles of wine for my hosts and then proceeded quickly on my way to watch the election results of a campaign that, for the first time since I was made aware of electoral politics—when Roosevelt defeated Willkie in 1940—I knew barely anything about.

I had been an avid voter all my life, one who’d never pulled a Republican lever for any office on any ballot. I had campaigned for Stevenson as a college student and had my juvenile expectations dismantled when Eisenhower trounced him, first in ’52 and then again in ’56; and I could not believe what I saw when a creature so rooted in his ruthless pathology, so transparently fraudulent and malicious as Nixon, defeated Humphrey in ’68, and when, in the eighties, a self-assured knucklehead whose unsurpassable hollowness and hackneyed sentiments and absolute blindness to every historical complexity became the object of national worship and, esteemed as a “great communicator” no less, won each of his two terms in a landslide. And was there ever an election like Gore versus Bush, resolved in the treacherous ways that it was, so perfectly calculated to quash the last shameful vestige of a law-abiding citizen’s naiveté? I’d hardly held myself aloof from the antagonisms of partisan politics, but now, having lived enthralled by America for nearly three-quarters of a century, I had decided no longer to be overtaken every four years by the emotions of a child—the emotions of a child and the pain of an adult. At least not so long as I holed up in my cabin, where I could manage to remain in America without America’s ever again being absorbed in me. Aside from writing books and studying once again, for a final go-round, the first great writers I read, all the rest that once mattered most no longer mattered at all, and I dispelled a good half, if not more, of a lifetime’s allegiances and pursuits. After 9/11 I pulled the plug on the contradictions. Otherwise, I told myself, you’ll become the exemplary letter-to-the-editor madman, the village grouch, manifesting the syndrome in all its seething ridiculousness: ranting and raving while you read the paper, and at night, on the phone with friends, roaring indignantly about the pernicious profitability for which a wounded nation’s authentic patriotism was about to be exploited by an imbecilic king, and in a republic, a king in a free country with all the slogans of freedom with which American children are raised. 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. The only paper I saw regularly was the Berkshire Eagle, a local weekly. I used the TV to watch baseball, the radio to listen to music, and that was it.

Surprisingly, it took only weeks to break the matter-of-fact habit that informed much of my nonprofessional thinking and to feel completely at home knowing nothing of what was going on. 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. Or maybe just down to the nub. My cabin could as well have been adrift on the high seas as set twelve hundred feet up on a rural road in Massachusetts that was less than a three-hour drive east to the city of Boston and about the same distance south to New York.

The television set was on when I arrived, and Billy assured me the election was in the bag—he was in touch with a friend at Democratic national headquarters, and their exit polls showed Kerry winning all the states he needed. Billy graciously accepted the wine and told me that Jamie had gone out to buy food and should be back at any minute. Once again he was expansively agreeable and exuded a jovial softness, as though he weren’t yet and probably never would be expert at wielding authority. Is he a throwback, I wondered, or do they still exist like this, middle-class Jewish boys who continue to be branded with the family empathy that, despite the unmatchable satisfaction of its cradling sentiments, can leave one unprepared for the nastiness of less kindly souls? In the Manhattan literary milieu particularly, I would have expected something other than the brown eyes weighty with tenderness and the full angelic cheeks that lent him the air, if not still of a protected small boy, then of the generous young man wholly unable to inflict a wound or laugh with scorn or shirk the smallest responsibility. I speculated that Jamie might be a lot more than could be managed by the sweet selflessness of one whose every word and gesture was permeated with his decency. The trusting innocence, the mildness, the sympathetic understanding—what a setup for the rogue with an eye to stealing the wife whose infidelity would be unimaginable to him.

The phone rang just as Billy was preparing to open one of the bottles of wine, and he handed it across to me to uncork while he snatched up the phone and said, “What now?” After a moment he looked up to tell me, “New Hampshire’s sewed up. D.C.?” Billy then asked the friend who was phoning. To me again he said, “In D.C. they’re going eight to one for Kerry. That’s the key—the blacks are turning out en masse. Okay, great,” Billy said into the phone, and upon hanging up told me happily, “So we live in a liberal democracy after all,” and, to toast the mounting thrill, he poured each of us a big glass of wine. “These guys would have devastated the country,” he said, “had they won a second term. We’ve had bad presidents and we’ve survived, but this one’s the bottom. Serious cognitive deficiencies. Dogmatic. A tremendously limited ignoramus about to wreck a very great thing. There’s a description in Macbeth that’s perfect for him. We read aloud together, Jamie and I. We’re doing the tragedies. It’s in the scene in act three with Hecate and the witches. ‘A wayward son,’ Hecate says, ‘spiteful and wrathful.’ George Bush in six words. It’s all so awful. If you’re for your kids and God, you’re a Republican—meanwhile, the people who are being screwed the most are his base. It’s amazing they pulled it off for even one term. It’s terrifying to think what they would have done with a second term. These are terrible, evil guys. But their arrogance and their lies finally caught up with them.”

My mind still full of my own thoughts, I allowed a couple of minutes more for him to continue to watch the first election results trickle in before I asked, “How did you meet Jamie?”

“Miraculously.”

“You were students together.”

He smiled most appealingly, when, given my thoughts, he would have done better pulling the dagger that had done in Duncan. “That makes it no less miraculous,” he said.

I saw there was no need to stop myself from hurtling forward for fear of being found out. Clearly Billy couldn’t begin to imagine that someone of my years might be asking about his young wife because his young wife was now all I could think about. There was my age to mislead him, and my eminence too. How could he possibly believe the worst about a writer he’d begun reading in high school? It was like meeting Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. How could the author of “The Song of Hiawatha” take a licentious interest in Jamie?

To be on the safe side, I asked first about him.

“Tell me about your family,” I said.

“Oh, I’m the only reading person in the family, but that doesn’t matter; they’re good people. In Philly now for four generations. My great-grandfather started the family business. He was from Odessa. His name was Sam. His customers called him Uncle Sam the Umbrella Man. He made and repaired umbrellas. My grandfather expanded into luggage. In the teens and the twenties, train travel boomed and suddenly everybody needed a piece of luggage. And people were traveling by ship, transatlantic ships. It was the era of the wardrobe trunk—you know, the big, heavy trunks people took on long journeys that opened up vertically and had hangers and drawers in them.”

“I know them well,” I said. “And the others, the smaller black ones that opened up horizontally like a pirate’s chest. I had a trunk like that to go off to college with. Nearly everyone did. It was constructed of wood and the corners were sheathed in metal and the fancy ones were girdled with bands of embossed metal and the lock was brass and made to withstand an earthquake. You used to ship your trunk by Railway Express. You’d take it down to the train station and leave it with the clerk at the Railway Express desk. The guy at Newark’s Penn Station in those days still wore the green eyeshade and kept his pencil tucked behind his ear. He’d weigh the trunk and you’d pay per pound and off your socks and underwear would go.”

“Yes, every city of any size had a luggage store, and the department stores all had luggage departments. It’s airline stewardesses,” Billy told me, “who revolutionized how Americans felt about luggage in the fifties—people saw that it could be light and chic. That’s about when my father went into the business and modernized the store and changed the name to Davidoff’s Fashionable Luggage. Until then, the place was still known by the original name, Samuel Davidoff and Sons. About this time along came the luggage on wheels—and that, vastly abridged, is th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• The Present Moment
• Under the Spell
• Amy’s Brain
• My Brain
• Rash Moments
• About the Author