For those who have never read Philip Roth and are thinking of starting, the best advice is ‘don’t start here’. Read instead I Married a Communist, American Pastoral or Sabbath’s Theater. Possibly in that order. His latest books are for those who love his work, no matter what, and are prepared to take the rough with the smooth. For instance, Exit Ghost, which features Nathan Zuckerman once again, has eerie half echoes of Sabbath’s Theater, though with an entirely different cast.
Exit Ghost also shares similarities with Everyman and Indignation: in each an elderly man is confronted with a sense of loss caused by ageing, the physical infirmities it brings, and the psychological problems that follow. For instance, in Exit Ghost we are told about the medical repercussions of prostate cancer (from which Roth suffers), which have led Nathan Zuckerman to become impotent and incontinent. Zuckerman is a rich and famous writer who prided himself on his virility in his younger days and who thinks a lot of himself; the fall from grace is therefore even harder. Essentially in all three books the protagonist is in denial, for want of a better word.
Exit Ghost is interesting because it casts light on the perennial Roth conundrum of ‘who is speaking?’, the author or the character, or some other amalgam, and does it matter. Zuckerman also alludes to his earlier work, which was painted on a larger, more political canvas, saying dismissively that he has done his ‘tour of duty’ as a liberal. In Exit Ghost social realism is a subtext. Ditto The Humbling, which is the worst of this latest batch.
Indignation is different, though it shares something in common with Everyman inasmuch as the protagonist turns out to be dead, or in the case of Marcus Messner, almost dead. Messner is young, still a teenager, working-class (the son of a butcher in Newark, New Jersey) and it is set during the early 1950s while the Korean war was still raging. It is a portrait of the narrow-mindedness and sexual repression that snuffed out his life (after falling foul of the principal at a college in Ohio he is drafted and dies a horrible death, at the age of 19, in Korea on Massacre Mountain.). We gets some Roth rhetoric, as in I Married a Communist, where he is showboating a bit but there is a little bit of grit. But reading Indignation there comes a sense of frustration; you feel it is an extract from a novel with a larger canvas that has not been written
Perhaps I am naďve but I like to make some ‘emotional investment’ in one character or another. With Roth in his present mood it is, more than ever, like negotiating with a wraith.
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– Michael Wagstaff
For those who have never read Philip Roth and are thinking of starting, the best advice is ‘don’t start here’. Read instead I Married a Communist, American Pastoral or Sabbath’s Theater. Possibly in that order. His latest books are for those who love his work, no matter what, and are prepared to take the rough with the smooth. For instance, Exit Ghost, which features Nathan Zuckerman once again, has eerie half echoes of Sabbath’s Theater, though with an entirely different cast.