Exit Ghost

EXIT GHOST is purportedly the final installment in the saga of Nathan Zuckerman, the fictional alter ego of Philip Roth. In this novel, Zuckerman returns to New York City, where he encounters a woman from his past, an overzealous biographer, and a much younger woman who leads him into tortured temptation. The accent that George Guidall gives to this young woman, a Texan, is oddly consistent, but that is the only quibble with his performance. Of the many qualities that make him one of the best narrators in the business is his facility with the voices of female characters. He manages to make them sound feminine without overdoing the higher pitches. D.B. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

June 18, 2007
Philip Roth’s 28th book is, it seems, the final novel in the Zuckerman series, which began in 1979 with The Ghostwriter
. A 71-year-old Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York after more than a decade in rural New England, ostensibly to see a doctor about a prostate condition that has left him incontinent and probably impotent. But Zuckerman being Zuckerman and Roth being Roth, the plot is much more complicated than it at first appears. Within a few days of arriving in New York, Zuckerman accidentally encounters Amy Bellette, the woman who was once the muse/wife of his beloved idol, writer S.I. Lonoff; he also meets a young novelist and promptly begins fantasizing about the writer’s young and beautiful wife. There’s also a subplot about a would-be Lonoff biographer, who enrages Zuckerman with his brashness and ambition, two qualities a faithful Roth reader can’t help ascribing to the young, sycophantic Zuckerman himself. As usual, Roth’s voice is wise and full of rueful wit, but the plot is contrived (the accidental meeting with Amy, for example, is particularly unbelievable) and the tone hovers dangerously close to pathetic. In the Rothian pantheon, this one lives closer to The Dying Animal
than Everyman
.