Exit Ghost

By Philip Roth

Book Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York in the final installment of the renowned Zuckerman series, a novel about love, mourning, desire, and animosity by "one of the greatest living American writers" (San Francisco Chronicle), the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral.

Alone for eleven years on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age. Walking the streets of New York after so many years away, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. Now Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.

Revisiting the characters from Roth's much-heralded The Ghost Writer, Exit Ghost is an astounding leap into yet another phase in this great writer's oeuvre.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307387291
• ISBN13: 9780307387295
• Release Date: November 2008
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.1" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Elegant, as usual...

For a glaring example of one of the main themes of "Exit Ghost" one need only read the recent Vanity Fair article about Arthur Miller's institutionalization of his Down Syndrome son. It was an article guaranteed to create a scandal; it was "cultural journalism" - tabloid gossip masquerading as literary investigation. It called into question the character of a great writer (as opposed, sadly, to the great writer's characters,...

A Voice That Becomes Better With Age

Let me make a confession: I am a Philip Roth junkie. Each year, I look forward to reading a new book by Mr. Roth, who tackles some of the difficult questions that plague us, yet those with which most of us fail to discuss. In his newest book, Exit Ghost, Mr. Roth gives us an aging, reclusive, incontenent and impotent character in the form of Nathan Zuckerman. As Zuckerman faces his own physical limitations, he must also tackle...

Roth Takes on the State of Literature in the Modern Culture

"Exit Ghost" is the second Philip Roth book that I've read. I read the first, "Everyman," a few months ago, and it convinced me that I'd been foolishly wrongheaded about not reading Roth earlier in my life. I had falsely believed that his male-centered themes and characters might hold no interest for me, a woman who came of age during the 1970s feminist movement. But my experience with these two books has taught me otherwise...

The End Of The Literary Era

In his latest creation, Roth shows that even a 71 year old incontinent and impotent Zuckerman (Roth in disguise) can still produce amazingly poignant and truly important literature. The book centers around the attempt to regain continence through a new procedure, while at the same time showing that regardless of the state of inoperative reproductive equipment, thoughts of sexuality still meander frequently and aggressively...

Haunting

There are lots of ghosts in this exquisite novel, and most of them take the reader back to _The Ghost Writer_, where the young Nathan Zuckerman met E.I Lonoff and Amy Bellette, two characters who haunt the old Nathan. In this tale, Lonoff, long dead, is being exhumed by a Young Turk who wants to make a name for himself by writing a scandalous biography of the writer. Amy, one of the walking dead, her brain riddled with cancer...