Executive Times
		2007 Book Reviews
		Exit Ghost by Philip Roth
Rating:			***
		(Recommended)
		Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com
	Finale Philip Roth’s ninth Zuckerman novel, Exit Ghost, brings Nathan Zuckerman back to a post-9/11 Manhattan, where he makes connections with his past. What starts as a visit to the doctor turns into something else entirely. Here’s an excerpt, pp. 32-35: The elevator of the small six-story white-brick apartment building took me to the top floor, where I was greeted at the doorway of apartment 6B by a chubby young man with a soft, agreeable manner who immediately said, "You're the writer." “I am. And you?" "A writer," he said with a smile. He led me inside and introduced me to his wife. "Yet a third writer," he said. She was a tall, slender young woman who, unlike her husband, no longer had a playful, childlike aspect in evidence anywhere, at least not tonight. Her long, narrow face was curtained by straight, fine black hair that fell to her shoulders and a little below, the cut seemingly designed to conceal some disfiguring blemish, though by no means one that was physical—she had an impeccable, creamily soft surface, whatever else she might be hiding. That she was boundlessly loved by her husband and the source of his sustenance was apparent in the undisguised tenderness with which his every gaze and gesture enveloped her, even when what she said was not necessarily to his liking. It was clear that she was considered by them the more brilliant of the two and that his personality was swaddled in hers. Her name was Jamie Logan, his Billy Davidoff, and as they walked me through the apartment, he seemed to take pleasure in deferentially calling me Mr. Zuckerman. It was an attractive apartment of three spacious rooms, furnished with pricey European-designed modern furniture and Oriental throw rugs and a beautiful Persian rug in the living room. There was a large workspace in the bedroom overlooking a tall plane tree in the rear yard and another workspace in the living room, which looked across to a church. Books were piled everywhere, and hanging on the walls where there weren't book-laden shelves were framed photographs of statuary in Italian cities taken by Billy. Who was funding the modest opulence of these two thirty-year-olds? My guess was that the money was his, that they had met at Amherst or Williams or Brown, a tame, wealthy, kindhearted Jewish boy and an intense poor girl, Irish, maybe half Italian, who from grade school on had never stopped excelling, self-propelled, perhaps even something of a climber... I had it wrong. The money was hers and it came from Texas. Her father was a Houston oilman with origins as American as American origins could be. Billy's Jewish family owned a luggage and umbrella shop in Philadelphia. The two had met in the graduate writing program at Columbia. Neither had as yet published a book, though five years earlier she'd had a short story in The New Yorker that had prompted inquiries about a novel from agents and publishers. I wouldn't have guessed right off that hers was the more developed creative disposition. After I was shown around, we sat in the quiet living room, where the windows were double-glazed. The small Lutheran church across the street, a charming little building with narrow windows and pointed arches and a rough stone facade, though probably built in the early 1900s, seemed designed to transport its Upper West Side congregants back five or six centuries to a rural village in northern Europe. Immediately outside the window the fanlike leaves of a thriving ginkgo tree were just beginning to lose their summertime green. A recording of Strauss's Four Last Songs had been playing softly in the background when I'd come into the apartment, and when Billy went to turn off the CD player, I wondered if the Four Last Songs were what he or Jamie happened to have been listening to before I came or if my arrival had prompted one or the other of them to play such dramatically elegiac, ravishingly emotional music written by a very old man at the close of his life. "His favorite instrument is the female voice," I said. "Or two," said Billy. "His favorite combination was two women singing together. The end of Rosenkavalier. The end of Arabella. In The Egyptian Helen." "You know Strauss," I said to him. "Well, my favorite instrument is the female voice too." His intention in saying that was to flatter his wife, but I pretended otherwise. "Do you write music as well?" I asked him. "No, no," said Billy. "I have a hard enough time with fiction. "Well, my house in the woods," I told them, "is no more peaceful than this." "We're leaving for only a year," Billy said. "May I ask why?" "Jamie's idea," he answered, sounding not as tamed as I'd imagined him. Reluctant to appear to interrogate her, I merely looked her way. Her sensual presence was strong—perhaps she kept herself on the thin side so it wouldn't be stronger. Or maybe so it would, since her breasts weren't those of an undernourished woman. She wore jeans and a low-cut, lacy silk blouse that resembled a little lingerie top—that was a little lingerie top, I realized upon looking again—and wrapping her torso was a longish cardigan with a thick edge of wide ribbing and a tie of the same ribbing pulled loosely around her narrow waist. It was a garment at the other end of the spectrum of female apparel from the hospital gown Amy Bellette had converted into a dress, its color paler and softer than tan and woven of a thick, soft cashmere. The sweater could easily have cost a thousand bucks, and she looked languid wearing it, languid and in enticing repose, as though she were wearing a kimono. She spoke rapidly and quietly, however, as highly complicated people will do, under pressure particularly. "Why are you coming to New York?" was Jamie's response to my gaze. "I have a friend who's ill here," I said. Roth needed to wrap up Zuckerman, and in Exit Ghost, the series concludes. This is neither the best nor the worst of Roth’s novels. And for fans, this is the same Nathan Zuckerman, just older. Steve Hopkins, November 20, 2007
Buy Exit Ghost @ amazon.com				Go To Hopkins & Company Homepage
Go to 2007 Book Shelf				Go to Executive Times Archives
Go to The Big Book Shelf: All Reviews
	2007 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the December 2007 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Exit Ghost.htm For Reprint Permission, Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302 Phone: 708-466-4650 • Fax: 708-386-8687 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com www.hopkinsandcompany.com