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Loading... Exit Ghostby Philip Roth
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won't like
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. I didn't love this latest (and last?) installment of Roth's Nathan Zuckerman novels. Zuckerman, impotent and incontinent following prostate surgery, leaves his Berkshires haven for Manhattan. He connects with the lover of his late literary hero, I. E. Lonoff, an aggressive would-be biographer of Lonoff who claims to know a secret, and a young couple with whom he agrees to swap homes for a year. The story was absorbing, and the writing as good as always, but the tone put me off. Zuckerman seems to equate his sexual impotency with his literary decline, and that's so facile. He also seems to revere the Great Male Writers with their Big Ideas and their Propulsive Energy, and gives me the impression he would disdain women writers. I've been reading a Roth novel a year, and the recent ones I've read didn't have this vaguely anti-feminist tone. (  )CasualFriday | May 20, 2009 |   After 11 years of isolation in his New England mountain refuge, Zuckerman returns to New York City and makes three important connections. The first is to a young couple with whom he suggests swapping homes. The second is to Amy, the former muse of Zuckerman's first literary hero, E.I. Lonoff. And the third is to a bold, ambitious Lonoff biographer who is irritatingly persistent. It seems Zuckerman's carefully protected sense of isolation is bound to be shattered. (  )jepeters333 | May 5, 2009 |   First chapter of this book made me want to strangle myself and stop writing my book and just capitulate that Phillip Roth is just SO MUCH SMARTER than any other writer ever, especially ones who want to write about old writers and editors and ghosts. And then the middle kind of got slow, so I thought, "Well, maybe it's doable." AND THEN I READ THE END and I almost committed suicide in the airport (in a good way, I mean, if you know what my novel is about, you understand.) But I can't give it five stars, because the middle is dull and there is SOME Roth-ian self-indulgence. But this one is good. For real. (  )miriamparker | Mar 19, 2009 | Exit Ghost is my first experience reading Philip Roth, but I don’t plan on making it my last. Slow going at first, I wasn’t sure I would really be able to get into it. How can a mid-thirties, single mom understand and relate to a septuagenarian man? How can I, a moderate to conservative Republican from the mid-west, relate to a liberal Democrat New Englander? I’m a product of the Eighties and Nineties, he is a product of the fifties and sixties. I’m a W.A.S.P. and he a Jew. I am in the Summer of my life when all my body parts are where the good Lord put them, and work within normal parameters. He is entering the Winter of his, incontinent, showing the beginning of dementia, with a mutinous body. I’m aware death will someday happen, though not many I know have experienced it. Zuckerman is facing it’s certainty, many of his friends and contemporaries having already passed through that gate. However, for all this lack of commonality, Roth manages the miraculous; for a time, a young woman in her prime became an aging man in his decline. Click for cull review: http://thekoolaidmom.wordpress.com/20... (  )thekoolaidmom | Feb 27, 2009 | bintphotobooks | Feb 16, 2009 | 0.041 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0618915478, Hardcover)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. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:03 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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