December 3, 2007
Revisiting "The Ghost Writer"
Having just finished reading “Exit Ghost,” Philip Roth‘s ninth and possibly final Nathan Zuckerman novel, I decided to go check out “The Ghost Writer,” the first book in this remarkable series.
The action in the book (which is included in the Library of America’s recently published trilogy of Roth novels, pictured right) revolves around a two-day visit Zuckerman paid to the rural Massachusetts home of his literary idol, E.I. Lonoff. During his stay, the two writers discuss literature and art at length but Lonoff’s wife becomes upset by the presence of Amy Bellette, a student who has been staying at the Lonoff home for some time. The wife wants to leave the marriage and says Bellette can spend the rest of her life as the caretaker for the cranky novelist.
Meanwhile, young Nathan has become infatuated with Amy. As the narrator of the book, he expands on her life story and suggests that she believes she is Anne Frank.
It was during the Anne Frank sequence that I came across the following passage, which made me think about Anne Frank and her diary in ways I’d never thought of before.
Roth, or Zuckerman rather, discusses how Anne Frank’s lack of Judaism made her diary (called Het Achterhuis in this excerpt) a success. In the process, it only confirms the European intolerance that made the Holocaust possible:
[T]hat was what gave her diary the power to make the nightmare real. To expect the great callous and indifferent world to care about the child of a pious, bearded father living under the sway of the rabbis and the rituals—that was pure folly. To the ordinary person with no great gift for tolerating even the smallest of differences the plight of that family wouldn’t mean a thing. To ordinary people it probably would seem that they had invited disaster by stubbornly repudiating everything modern and European—not to say Christian. But the family of Otto Frank, that would be another matter! How could even the most obtuse of the ordinary ignore what had been done to the Jews just for being Jews, how could even the most benighted of the Gentiles fail to get the idea when they read in Het Achterhuis that once a year the Franks sang a harmless Chanukah song, said some Hebrew words, lighted some candles, exchanged some presents—a ceremony lasting about ten minutes—and that was all it took to make them the enemy. It did not even take that much. It took nothing—that was the horror. And that was the truth. And that was the power of her book.
If you want to hear more from Roth, here is a link to a recent Amazon podcast interview with him.
I bought The Ghost Writer, also, after reading Exit Ghost. I will be starting it within the next couple of days.
You’ll like it. I wished I’d read it before I read Exit Ghost. It gives a lot of additional background.