Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

The latest novel by Philip Roth continues the trend of books some of my favorite writers that have infuriated me to the point of rage. Most of this is due to my immediate sense of disappointment at the efforts from artists I consider to be above the norm in their output and who seem to be settling for lesser works. Starting with DeLillo's last novel, Falling Man, or more specifically his last three books, and Roth's last four, The Plot Against America being mostly unobjectionable, these two titans have produced nothing of real merit, and in Roth's case it's been nothing but a rehashing of the same basic plot over and over. The boilerplate version seeming to be: older male with unquenchable sexual drive cheats on wife or wives with mistresses who are either younger, dumber or both and who inevitably have something awful happen to them for their efforts. And yet it's amazing to see that the critical appraisal of these last few books, regardless of their sameness and seemingly uninspired writing, has remained virtually the same, highly praiseworthy, and Roth's popularity and literary standing have done nothing but rise.

What is it that bothers me about these books? It's probably easier to say what doesn't first. Roth's writing is incredibly good in every sense of the word. He's a master wordsmith who has a commanding grasp on the language and is never one to write sparsely. There are passages of dense beauty in every one of his books, and he has a true knack for the ability to alternate between books of sweeping magnitude and novella length works that never fail to showcase his true ability as a writer. As for the plots of the novels themselves, it almost seems secondary at this point for certain writers that I follow. I would pretty much read anything put out by the list of writers I’m devoted to or at least give them the old college try. As I said, the plots of Roth's last few novels are more or less indistinguishable from one another. If not for the changing titles, which seem interchangeable and highly irrelevant, one might not be mistaken in thinking that they'd read the book before. Even knowing that, I'm compelled to read his works again and again, and that's where the burn set in.

Where to begin?

After the aforementioned praise I've heaped on Roth, now it's time to turn my sights to what's wrong with Roth. To start, much like DeLillo, Roth apparently believes that there are no stable marriages, only unstable ones that deteriorate into shattered husks of what marriages represent. The men, again like DeLillo, are almost always too complex for their wives and need to seek solace in the arms of another woman, usually, as I said, someone of far lesser intellect and shallowness beyond the pale. The men, rarely portrayed as being overly handsome seem to be irresistible to these much younger, voracious women. In one novel this is an acceptable plot device, but in novel after novel, it begins to wear thin. Marriage in America is not sacred, not as valued as it once was, not devotion but an act of convenience for the couple, and apparently never based on true love. Fine, the point has been made, and it's time to move on.

Even when the real narrative is supposed to be focusing on another aspect of the character, as in Everyman where we're supposed to be witnessing the slow deterioration of an unnamed protagonist, we are still treated to passages describing his infidelity to his wife. If ever there was a plot device that needed to be buried, this is it.

I also find it odd that no one has really picked up on this repetition in his work, or if they have, and it’s hard to believe that they haven’t, no one is objecting to it in the least. Roth, at this point in his career, seems to have obtained the untouchable status, or that of a literary sacred cow, who is beyond reproach. His writings, if one believes the critics, are full of fresh insights, or they are at least insightful into the human condition, revealing something about ourselves that is rarely spoken aloud. But considering that three of Roth’s last four novels were barely over two hundred pages and with plots wholly reminiscent of one another, it’s hard for me to imagine or detect what that insight is or how fresh it might be. I recently read about the use of coincidence in the "big novel,” and it struck me that if that's a big deal to critics, then why isn't Roth skewered by those very same critics for relying on these tiresome portrayals of suburbia that even Updike has forsaken in favor of other pursuits. Sure, the fifties and sixties were ripe with sexual freedom and a more radical willingness to experiment in many ways, but hasn’t that been established, and how is it that this type of culture hasn’t progressed in the last thirty years? If one looks to Roth as a cultural barometer, then it hasn’t all that much. Roth might be saying that we’re all still prudish and repressive, and that might be true, but he isn’t revealing anything in his writing that would suggest that he’s trying to do anything other than to shock us into awareness that there are a lot of unhappily married people out there.

Accompanying these portrayals of shattered marriages, are the inevitable passages detailing the sexual acts between the male and the mistress, presumably portraying those acts that the wife would not or could not provide the husband. Anal sex, oral sex, women gagging, women biting, masturbation and all sorts of portrayals of sex are thrown in to all of Roth's novels. Sure, sex is a part of life, but Roth's obsession, or his perception that everyone is society is obsessed with sex, is ludicrous. All of Roth's characters seem to engage in is having sex, talking about sex, or thinking about sex, that is when they aren't engaged in conversations leading up to it or fighting about the after affects of it. You'd be hard pressed to find such portrayals of sex anywhere outside of a Penthouse Forum. Does this happen everyday? Sure, but, again, hasn't Roth made his point in countless novels? What more does he hope to accomplish by repeatedly driving this point home?

To round it all out, Roth has every woman in every one of his books posses breasts that are worthy of comment, repeatedly. Now, breasts are as important to me as the next guy, but Roth takes this to another level. Women, even well educated successful ones, are portrayed as using their sexuality as a means to manipulate, and their breasts are the main source of this power. Jamie Logan, the woman in Exit Ghost whom Nathan Zuckerman is so taken with, is a successful writer with a story published in the New Yorker, but that all goes by the wayside, and is apparently not credited to her talent and ability as a writer, but as a woman manipulative enough to ensnare multiple men in her web. And most of the women are like this in Roth's books. Rarely are they blessed with any real talent. As I mentioned, most of these women are then stricken with disease or just plain old age that removes them from the game that men and women play. Amy Bellette's torturous decline is of particular note. Her brain has deteriorated to the point where she's in dialogue with her own brain tumor, one that acts on her behalf, or at least is culpable for all of the bad decisions she’s made lately. And yet one couldn't be blamed for mistaking that this fate is much more preferable to the impotence and incontinence that have beset Nathan Zuckerman. The male deterioration is obviously given greater weight and significance in Roth's world.

Next there's the dialogue that Roth has his writers spout out. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I know that people don't speak the way they speak in novels, but Roth's dialogue is atrocious. It's almost as if he's never actually spoken to another human being and has no idea how people talk, and I'm not referring only to the sexual nature of his dialogue, which is a whole other creature in and of itself, I'm also referring to his dialogue between characters. The scenes in Exit Ghost between Nathan Zuckerman and Richard Kliman, a boisterous writer who wants to reveal a dirty secret regarding Zuckerman's hero E.I. Lonoff, contain some of the worst dialogue I've ever read. "Caligula wins" is a line that Kliman uses upon answering the phone the day after George W. Bush won his second term. Does anyone talk like this? I doubt even the most theatrical of political beasts would be so inclined to use language like that upon answering a phone. There's also a particularly nasty exchange between Kliman and Zuckerman where the former tells the latter, "You stink, you smell bad! Crawl back into your hole and die! You're dying, old man, you'll soon be dead! You smell of decay! You smell of death!" Roth’s writing borders on farce at this point.

Finally, and perhaps most quizzically, Roth devotes several pages to Zuckerman's reaction to the death of George Plimpton. Not only is it an odd choice on Roth's part to add this in the midst of the narrative, but it also stresses the credibility of it. If Zuckerman and Plimpton were the close acquaintances as is portrayed, doesn't it seem odd that more than a year after the latter's death the former is still unaware of it? Sure, Zuckerman is in near isolation in his remote sanctuary, but it seems unrealistic that he's so cut off, even from his publisher or any sort of acquaintance, that the death of a fellow writer, and one who is held in such high esteem by the narrator at that, is a nonevent. It's almost as if Zuckerman's reaction to Plimpton's death is a literal example of the eternal question of if a tree falls in the woods, does it make a sound, but in this case it's if you live in isolation for so long, does life around you stop?

There's much more I could criticize about the novel, like Zuckerman's repeated claims that his deteriorating mind leaves him grasping for words and memories yet he can still write a flawless sentence, or the totally extraneous dialogues that appear throughout the text that are between an unnamed "He" and "She" who represent Zuckerman and Jamie Logan. Roth and numerous critics apparently believe that this is a stunning novel and a fitting epitaph to the Zuckerman saga, but I'm afraid they are wrong, especially when one considers that Roth has been writing the same novel repeatedly for years now.