Goodbye, Zuckerman

(Not Zuckerman)

 

Exit Ghost is the last of Philip Roth’s nine Nathan Zuckerman novels. The first eight have already taken their place in the canon of American fiction.

For those new to the series, the books are grouped into smaller units. There is a first trilogy consisting of The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), and The Anatomy Lesson (1983), subsequently gathered with a novella-length epilogue, The Prague Orgy, as Zuckerman Bound (1985):

A stand-alone novel, The Counterlife (1986):

The ‘American Trilogy’ of American Pastoral (1997), I Married A Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000):

And now we have Exit Ghost:

A version – or perhaps more accurately versions- of the Zuckerman character first turned up in the two “useful fictions” within the novel My Life As A Man(1975). That fluid Zuckerman was supposedly the fictional creation of the character Peter Tarnopol. But apart from some basic biographical simularities – born 1933 in Newark, etc. – that Zuckerman is really a different character to the Zuckerman we follow through the nine novels.

Whereas the David Kapesh books – The Breast (1973), The Professor of Desire (1977) and The Dying Animal (2001) – eschew biographical continuity, Zuckerman is an essentially consistent entity, although alternate biographical possibilities are explored in the five chapters of The Counterlife.

The Guardian has a comprehensive biography of Zuckerman:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2179283,00.html

The Zuckerman we encounter is “a serious person”, an amoral erotic outlaw, an often tiresomely didactic character. Pedantic self-justification is the home key, whether Zuckerman is defending his right to publish unflattering stories of suburban Jewish life, insisting on the utter stupidity of confusing real life with fiction, or attacking literary critics. He is usually humourless and standoffish, and becomes a recluse in the Berkshires halfway through the series.

The archetypal Rothian protagonist is not only always right, but is addicted to insisting on his rightness with tremendous energy. That provides drama, often of an hysterical and mundane kind, and, on occasion, comedy. But I feel that an absence of authorial irony sometimes impairs the early books. Sometimes the books don’t seem to take into consideration that the narrator might actually be wrong. If nothing else the Rothian protagonist has a habit of launching wasteful wars against what are essentially tiny provocations. I feel the more successful of Roth’s books – or at least the funniest ones – are those in which there is a clear ironic distance between the author and the protagonist. Sabbath’s Theater‘s undisciplined, racist, enormously misogynistic failure of an anti-hero represents the pinacle of that model.

Roth himself is ever furious that people assume Zuckerman to be a thinly veiled version of himself (as Zuckerman is ever furious that people assume Carnovsky to be a thinly veiled version of himself). Fair enough. The contemporary thirst for tell-all celebrity scandal is deplorable, and marketing novels as confessional memoirs does literature no favours. Anybody who actually writes fiction knows how misguided and pointless it would be for a reader to try to unlock a roman à clef when the lock itself probably has no keyhole. As Roth never ceases to lecture us, when he writes he is impersonating, inventing, ventriloquizing, creating counter-selves, etc. The very frustration of Roth’s own early experience of being confused with Alexander Portnoy obviously seeded the fictional experience of Zuckerman. Yet rather than write books entirely removed from his own lived experience, it has long been Roth’s subversive delight to challenge the reader not to see ‘Zuckerman’ or ‘Kapesh’ or ‘Philip Roth’ as the real Philip Roth.

So the novelist’s process of transforming life into art is a recurring theme of these Zuckerman books. The ‘American trilogy’, in which the narrating Zuckerman essentially steps back from the action, does not purport to tell the actual stories of Swede Levov, Ira Ringold and Coleman Silk, but rather Zuckerman’s own invented tellings based on the available evidence. This mirrors how everybody makes sense of the world.

In one central passage of American Pastoral Zuckerman acknowledges:

“The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again.”

In Exit Ghost there is a familiar reworking of the old themes. Zuckerman, aged 71, is back as an active protagonist. It is 2004. Zuckerman leaves his rural retreat for New York City to seek a treatment for his incontinence (a legacy of surgery for prostrate cancer that has also left him inpotent). Literary culture is dying. People use cellular phones. George W Bush is about to be reelected. Zuckerman encounters a dramatically aged and sick Amy Bellette, the character from The Ghost Writer whom Zuckerman once imagined to be Anne Frank. He rashly decides to swap his country house for the city apartment of a young couple and quickly gets the hots for the wife, a thirty-year old named Jamie with breasts that “weren’t those of an undernourished woman”. Then Zuckerman is accosted by a virile and pushy young man, Richard Kliman, who is not only Jamie’s ex-lover but, by an extremely clunky coincidence, also a writer planning a biographical expose of the long-dead and now obscure writer E. I. Lonoff, whose faithful lover was…Amy Bellette. What follows is Zuckerman’s decision – motivated by literary principle and sexual jealousy – to thwart Kliman’s biography, which will expose Lonoff’s teenage incest, the only evidence of which appears to be an unpublished manuscript (again, Zuckerman snarls, it is a moronic crime to confuse life with fiction). There is a reunion with Amy – the most moving part of the book – and a tentative and hopeless fixation on Jamie. In despair, Zuckerman sets down on paper invented exchanges between himself and Jamie. This leads to a quintessentially Rothian reflection:

“But isn’t one’s pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen? Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.”

Bleak drama in Zuckerman’s sexual winter. While Roth has ruthlessly dramatized most aspects of male sexuality, for many years one thing remained consistent – no matter how ravaged and tortured by miserable relationships, his massively self-confident adult protagonists never seemed to confront straight-forward sexual rejection. The later novels – particularly The Dying Animal, Everyman (2006) and Exit Ghost – are remarkable because the surfeit of pussy finally vanishes as old age attacks. Yes, David Kapesh at 62 somehow seduces his big-breasted 24-year-old Cuban student – the kind of socially deplored heterosexual transgression needed to fuel Roth’s polemics about sanctimony and hypocrisy, even if such a girl is an extremely unlikely conquest for any old man lacking the accoutrements of a Philip Roth – but Kapesh is certainly on the outer edge of virility and confronted by the “extremely painful…pornography of jealousy” when the girl leaves. Everyman at about 70 tries to pick up a jogger who “would have to be in her late twenties and yet, with her long, crinkly auburn hair tied back and in her running shorts and tank top, and small as she was, she might have been taken for fourteen.” It doesn’t happen. And in Exit Ghost Jamie has no sexual interest in Zuckerman. He knows there is no physical way to act on his desire should she feel different. It’s easy to complain that these May-December erotic fixations are immature and almost entirely physical. They are. But that doesn’t make such fixations any less likely. We are, in a sense, back in the Portnoyesque world of sexual futility, but it is now no laughing matter. Only Sabbath’s Theater (1995), the Great American Dirty Old Man Novel, attempts to tap the humour of this physical and sexual decline – dark and hateful and despairing humour – which is why these latest books read a little like slighter, straighter retreads of that great novel.

For all its crisp and nuanced sentences, Exit Ghost is ultimately the least interesting of the Zuckerman books. Most memorable in the series are The Ghostwriter for its classical economy, The Counterlife for its metafictional bravura, and American Pastoral, as a portrait of 1960s radicalism. Taken as a series, it is hard to think of a match in contemporary American literature.