November 26, 2007
Review: Philip Roth’s "Exit Ghost"
Why does Philip Roth infuse his books with veiled autobiographical references and then rebuke readers and critics for trying to connect the dots between his fiction and his real life?
That’s one of the vexing central questions of this remarkable novelist’s career. He invites the scrutiny and yet continually cautions against reading anything into his novels that might be mistaken for the real Philip Roth.
A little more than halfway through Roth’s latest novel, “Exit Ghost,” we read a ‘fictional’ letter written to The New York Times. It begins:
There was a time when intelligent people used literature to think. That time is coming to an end. During the decades of the Cold War, in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European satellites, it was the serious writers who were expelled from literature; now, in America, it is literature that has been expelled as a serious influence on how life is perceived. The predominant uses to which literature is now put in the culture pages of the enlightened newspapers and in university English departments are so destructively at odds with the aims of imaginative writing, as well as with the rewards that literature affords an open-minded reader, that it would be better if literature were no longer put to any public use.
In the novel, the letter’s author is Amy Bellette, an elderly woman whose been battling a brain tumor. Perhaps not incidentally, her former love interest, the late author E.I. Lonoff, has become the target of an aggressive young literary biographer named Rickard Kliman, who is bent on making his career by publishing Lonoff’s ‘great secret.’
Bellette is showing the letter to Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s literary alter ego who has appeared in eight previous novels. According to the publisher, this is Roth’s final installment in the Zuckerman series.
Zuckerman wants to help Bellette protect Lonoff’s reputation but between her tumor and his forgetfulness, these two seniors are having trouble remembering what was done when and by whom. She has a copy of Lonoff’s final, unpublished novel but she can’t recall whether she gave half of it to the young would-be biographer.
Bellette says she’s tired of everyone bothering her about the book. The apparent subject of the book — an incestuous relationship — would lead to all sorts of questions about the dead author’s life. Kliman has only read half of it but he believes it’s enough to prove Lonoff had an affair with his older sister.
Back to that letter. Bellette read an article in the Times in which a reporter went to Michigan to hunt down the real-life models for Hemingway’s Upper Peninsula stories. In her letter, Bellette excoriates the Times for its “cultural journalism,” something she brands as “tabloid gossip disguised as an interest in ‘the arts.’” She goes on to say:
[E]verything that it touches is contracted into what it is not. Who is the celebrity, what is the price, what is the scandal? What transgression has the writer committed, and not against the exigencies of literary aesthetics but against his or her daughter, son, mother, father, spouse, lover, friend, publisher, or pet? Without the least idea of what is innately transgressive about the literary imagination, cultural journalism is ever mindful of phony ethical issues: “Does the writer have a right to blah-blah-blah?” It is hyper-sensitive to the invasion of privacy perpetrated by literature over the millennia, while maniacally dedicated to the exposing in print, unfictionalized, whose privacy has been invaded and how. One is struck by the regard cultural journalists have for the barriers of privacy when it comes to the novel.
The letter stretches on for three pages and in the interest of not reducing it any further into what it is not, I will not paraphrase it except to say that Amy Bellette believes that authors’ lives — and especially their personal transgressions — should not be the measure by which their work is judged. The two should remain distinct and unrelated.
And that’s when you think Philip Roth has got a point. The letter advocates the New Critics’ argument, saying that the text itself should be autonomous. It’s an argument that becomes even more stark if we were to include a discussion of Woody Allen’s films or Richard Wagner’s music. Why not let the book or the film or the music or the sculpture or the whatever speak for itself? The impact of the artwork should emanate from the work itself, not the artist’s biography, right?
I disagree and here’s why: As Bellette’s letter states, literature — or for that matter any of the arts — is meant to provoke thought. Thought can be powerful elixir — powerful enough to change people’s lives. Thought leads to action and it can have a serious impact on society.
We can point to Wagner and see that his thoughts and biography had an impact on his motives and his music. In turn, his music had an impact on Hitler and the other racial theorists of the early 20th century.
And so, it is a worthy endeavor for the critic to examine the artist’s motivation for creating their art and that includes a discussion of the artist’s biography, the historical context of their work and the other works that influenced them.
When it comes to Roth, we’re forced to wonder if he’s simply mocking readers and critics by creating a character like Nathan Zuckerman and then telling everyone to back off the comparisons. This author can be downright confounding when we look at him from this angle.
To be fair, there is some room for nuance in Roth’s statements. Bellette’s letter attacks a specific type of journalism that aims to scandalize. Similarly, in an interview published in the Oct. 1, 2007 issue of The New Yorker, Roth told author Hermione Lee that the presentation of Kliman in the book is not an attack on the genre of biography:
As for the novelist’s [Zuckerman’s] animus against biography—there is none. The animus is against the kind of biography Zuckerman believes Kliman to be writing, and his assessment is grounded in what he judges to be the highly dubious evidence that Kliman presents of Lonoff’s “secret history.” It would be as wrong-headed to read into the presentation of Kliman an attack on the genre of biography as to read, say, my presentation of Portnoy as an attack on the practice of masturbation. I count myself a friend of both.
Not gonna touch the last point but we’ll note that there are shades of gray in his condemnation of biographers. He never mentions what he thinks of literary bloggers.
Critiquing “Exit Ghost” on its own merits, we find a remarkable novel in which Roth examines the creeping loss of power associated with growing old.
The action in the book centers on the elder incarnation of Nathan Zuckerman. It’s the week of the 2004 U.S. presidential election and Zuckerman has returned to Manhattan for the first time in 11 years. That’s how long he’s been holed up in his mountain cabin in rural Massachusetts with very little contact from the outside world.
He’s come to the city for a collagen injection in his bladder to help control his incontinence. By chance, he reads a classified ad in the New York Review of Books from a couple looking to swap their apartment for a place in the country for one year. Zuckerman calls and they agree to a deal.
But, things do not go smoothly. Zuckerman falls hard for the young wife even though he knows he could never please her because the surgery from his prostate cancer has left him impotent. Also, he believes Kliman is her secret lover and that makes him even crazier.
It is this weeklong sojourn in the city that teaches Zuckerman about his new limits. He knew he was growing older while he was holed up in the country but there’s nothing like an exhausting encounter with Kliman or an unfulfill-able longing for a beautiful young woman to make you realize exactly how old you’ve become. The passing of time does not announce itself but its effects are unmistakable and unavoidable.
Roth told Hermione Lee this:
Zuckerman is no longer quite the man he once was, with the capacities and the stamina and the interests of the man he once was. In his own words, he is “a no longer.” He is over seventy, and age makes a difference — and the difference that it makes is a central subject of the novel.
I’m not sure what difference age has made to Roth as a novelist. He continues to put out great stuff year after year. And, even though he can be extremely confounding when it comes to the question of his real life in his fiction, I’m hoping Roth manages to keep it up for a long time to come.