COMPARE AND CONTRAST: An Occasional Series

Carlin Romano on Exit Ghost for the Philadelphia Inquirer:

You'd call it a pattern if it were not, across the broad scope of Roth's oeuvre, far more - a pathetic mosaic. In Exit Ghost, as in The Dying Animal, the falsest notes Roth hits are in orchestrating the young woman's psychology and dialogue, preposterously portraying her mounting interest in the older man. If you read the new book, note how many times we're told in He and She that Jamie laughed at a Zuckerman comment. Ask yourself if someone in her situation would.

How, hypothetically, would one review Exit Ghost if it were a first novel by an unknown? Conversational and readable, cliched in its larger plot, lacking fresh imagery or arresting wordplay, and unconvincing in the judgments it tries to shove down the reader's throat: that Kliman is a "domineering" jerk, that Jamie doesn't know what she wants in a man, that Amy remained satisfied with just four years of Lonoff because she'd had the privilege of being "in love with a great man."

As the umpteenth recycling of Roth's obsessions, Exit Ghost will doubtless draw Roth admirers to explore and celebrate it, connecting all the new dots to previous Zuckerman lore as if they were painting a portrait of literature itself. Less enamored readers may conclude that to the extent Roth possesses an imagination, it's an insufferable one.

Bharat Tandon on Exit Ghost for Times Literary Supplement.

Stylistically, Exit Ghost is something of a surprise: a reader acclimatized to the progressive sidelining of Zuckerman’s own life during the American Pastoral trilogy might take some time to get used to his newly rediscovered centrality – almost as if Joseph Conrad had followed Chance with a picaresque first-person narrative entitled The Adventures of Marlow. Nor is it a flawless work: for example, Zuckerman’s encomium on George Plimpton feels like an insufficiently fictionalized valedictory address; and for all Roth’s deliberate highlighting of “the theatrical emotions that the horrors of politics inspire”, Jamie and Billy’s growing despair as the 2004 presidential election results emerge (“The turn to the right in this country is a movement to replace political institutions with morality”) is rather a stolid and undramatized performance compared to the rage of Merry Levov in American Pastoral or Herman Roth in The Plot Against America (2004). But this is not where the novel’s interest truly lies; in fact, one passage near the beginning hints at this:

I started toward the subway to take a train downtown to Ground Zero. Begin there, where the biggest thing of all occurred . . . . I never made it to the subway . . . . Instead, after crossing the park, I found myself in the familiar rooms of the Metropolitan Museum.

One might read that change of direction as Roth’s resistance to the easier historical associations attendant on a post-2001 New York fiction: Exit Ghost’s focus is more on the smaller physical and emotional scarrings that are part of the publicly brutalized landscape. And if much of the novel plays old against new, with the present recapitulating the past, Zuckerman’s story highlights that terrible form of self-reference around which so much of Roth’s recent work has circled: the fact that ageing lampoons us all, makes us grotesque bodily parodies of ourselves. Where the Zuckerman of the early novels could be prodigal with his semen, now he just leaks urine, and the dignity of Roth’s writing, recalling the hard-headedness of his memoir Patrimony (1991), lies in his not sparing Zuckerman the indignity. The sound of time in late Roth is not that of a winged chariot but of a hospital trolley with badly greased wheels; and there are few American writers who write with such power of the loss of powers, with such command of the chaos that haunts and mocks every attempt at shape. Roth has one final indignity in store for Zuckerman: Amy’s brain cancer is killing her, and a reader eventually finds out that Zuckerman’s memory (the part into which so much of his being retreated during the American Pastoral trilogy) has begun to fail him, a revelation which lends a retrospective poignancy to some of the novel’s earlier moments (“I’d copied the phone number onto a piece of scrap paper on which I’d written the name ‘Amy Bellette’”).

Comments

[Steven Augustine]

Wouldn't it be useful if someone who set out to critique a novel "professionally" actually knew *something* of how a novel works?

When Carlin Romano writes, "If you read the new book, note how many times we're told in He and She that Jamie laughed at a Zuckerman comment. Ask yourself if someone in her situation would," it's awfully clear he isn't grasping the fact that Roth is showing a master's lack of authorial vanity in allowing the Zuckerman character, who so many think of as a not-even-thinly-veiled Roth, to make a fool of himself.

Roth could conform to current fashion and render his "alter ego" a flawed-but-lovable paragon (à la that other Nate, from Auster's "The Brooklyn Follies", wisely shrugging off his crush on an inappropriately young beauty in exchange for something with the young beauty's mother; how terribly correct)...but Roth's an *Artist*, not a simpering nurse to the wounded reader.

The embarrassingly flirtatious bits in the He/She passages in "Exit" are Zuckerman *fantasizing*, that's obvious; Roth shows us an old man behave foolishly (while showing us, also, a young man behaving despicably)...is there something preposterous in either case that I'm missing?

Having said all that, I'd be the last to trumpet "Exit Ghost" as a masterpiece; the first to admit it's a disappointment; the first to wonder, also, if Roth isn't a little bored with Zuckerman, since the book seems to be missing a whole layer of complications (and 100 pages or so). Why even mention, in Act One, for example, that loaded rifle...?

More disappointing is how Roth lets coincidence connect Zuck to the malevolent (or malevolently hollow) center of the action, Kliman, whereas with Alvin Pepler (the delightful nemesis from "Zuckerman Unbound"), the comedy and menace flow from the fact that the connection is *willed*; Pepler has a plan, and the plan means something. With Kliman, the animus Zuck is exposed to is just an (astronomically unlikely) accident. None of Nabokov's beautifully orchestrated McFate there; nothing but Zuckerman's secular old rotten luck.

Still, Philip Roth is *Philip Roth*. The man is not an Artistic mediocrity, charlatan or fool; we're not all just *imagining* his stature as a novelist. Romano's fatuously superior takedown is either the work of a dim bulb or a skimmer (slow down; read carefully; try to articulate what you *understand* of the book, rather than what you dislike in the writer), and I'm still not sure which is worse.

[Jonathan Cohen]

As familiar as I am with Romano's pompous natterings from the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education, I can calmly assert that he could not be a greater Philistine if he sacrificed daily to Dagon.

[steve mitchelmore]

Mark, from looking at the cover, "Exit Ghost" doesn't have a comma in the title. Are you perhaps unconsciously seeking a companion for a forthcoming novel with a two-word title that does?

[TEV]

Wow - that's funny, Steve. Good catch. No doubt I am unduly attached to commas these days. Fixing it.

[Martha Southgate]

Genius he may be, but I think it's really weird how male critics (fans or not) rarely if ever, acknowledge Roth's profound misogyny. Yeah, he can write. He's a genius with the prose. I get that. But as a woman, it doesn't make the misogyny any less troubling. Perhaps that's what Romano was clumsily trying to get at.

[Steven Augustine]

Roth is *not* a "misogynist". He writes from a "male" perspective (this is his stated purview), but please name a male paragon...a penis-bearing character who gets off (no pun intended), in his books, without being exposed as a ninny/bastard/psycho/schlub. He's no more a "misogynist" than Alice Munro, Flannery O'Connor or Gertrude Stein are "man-haters" (or misogynists, for that matter).

I don't want to come off all school-marmishly tetchy here but I think this is an important issue, an issue that tracks to the heart of how we so often read/misread texts now. As popular writers go ever "softer", the writers who remain "hard" look increasingly like nasty old goats, I think: Mark's linking of the Bukiet "Wonderbread" essay is *so* apt, here.

We throw the term "misogynist" around too freely. A writer who presents a narrative in which a character expresses sex-obsessed, or even negative, thoughts about a particular female character, is not his/herself a misogynist by default, and neither is the character (though the character may well be). Roth's characters are not, traditionally, cheerleaders for the human race; one of the nastiest (and richest, incidentally) would be Mick Sabbath. Sabbath is bitter/angry/dismissive towards men and women *both*; quote a single passage where he singles out "woman" (the *population*) for his genuine disgust/hatred.

Where's the "misogyny"? Is he a "misogynist" because he's obsessed with sex? Would he be free of the "misogynist" label if the sex he were obsessed with were homosexual? Are there no aged male humans who are obsessed with sex? Is this not a worthy/illuminating (if, to some, depressing) subject?

Is "Zuckerman" a selfish creep who sees all women as doormats, mommies, muses or whores? Very possibly. Roth is not, by presenting this character with all of his terribly average character flaws, lionizing the flaws; he's telling a story about life on earth, and it's not a lullaby. Tales of misogyny are not misogynist *per se*.

Roth is too often charged with this crime; there is rarely (if ever) textual proof. This is an impressionistic old trope, driven by emotions and "verified" by popular repetition.

Sincerely: Martha: where is the specific textual proof?