The Life Whose Meaning Comes to Matter Most

Posted 13 December, 2007 in Book Reviews |

Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth. Viking Canada, $32.50 cloth, 294 pp., ISBN: 978-0-670-06729-9.

Philip Roth concludes his autobiography, The Facts, with a letter from his most famous character, the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, addressed to Philip Roth. Zuckerman is responding to the letter that opens the book, penned by Roth to his fictional creation, asking the character to tell his creator whether The Facts should be published.

Zuckerman suggests that Roth refrain from publishing the volume of autobiography, saying that Roth is “far better off” narrating Zuckerman’s adventures than reporting on his own. “Could it be that you’ve turned yourself into a subject not only because you’re tired of me but because you believe I am no longer someone through whom you can detach yourself from your biography at the same time that you exploit its crises, themes, tensions, and surprises?”

The detachment that Zuckerman highlights is a signal aspect of Roth’s approach, as it must be for any novelist who so rigorously plumbs “the facts” of his own life for the source of his fiction, going so far as to include a protagonist named “Philip Roth” in his novels Operation Shylock and The Plot Against America. For such a resolutely “autobiographical” novelist, the process of filtering one’s own life through the machinery of narrative necessitates an intricate navigation of the line between fiction and reality, the former encompassing a careful artistic reworking of the latter.

Zuckerman’s letter to Roth continues:

What you choose to tell in fiction is different from what you’re permitted to tell when nothing’s being fictionalized, and in this book you are not permitted to tell what it is you tell best: kind, discreet, careful — changing people’s names because you’re worried about hurting their feelings — no, this isn’t you at your most interesting. In the fiction you can be so much more truthful without worrying all the time about causing direct pain. You try to pass off here as frankness what looks to me like the dance of the seven veils — what’s on the page is like a code for something missing. Inhibition appears not only as a reluctance to say certain things but, equally disappointing, as a slowing of pace, a refusal to explode, a relinquishing of the need I ordinarily associate with you for the acute, explosive moment.

On the one hand, this is a kind of self-satisfied postmodern conceit: the fictional creation excoriating his creator for the faults he (Zuckerman? Roth?) sees in the creator’s own autobiographical book. It is also a sly end-run around criticisms of the autobiography: if The Facts is, indeed, marked by “a reluctance to say certain things,” “a slowing of pace,” and “a refusal to explode,” if it is devoid of “the acute explosive moment” that characterizes so much of Roth’s fiction — a case could be made — Roth has neatly circumvented this criticism, as much as admitting that he is cognizant of these failings by having Zuckerman vocalize them.

But framing the autobiography with letters to and from a fictional character is a quintessential example of Roth’s habit of blurring the line between fiction and “the facts.” Indeed, the quotation marks around those words are necessary to underscore the irony in Roth’s chosen title, something he himself attests to in his opening letter: “I suppose that calling this book The Facts begs so many questions that I could manage to be both less ironic and more ironic by calling it Begging the Question.”

If The Facts involves a layering of fictional techniques onto what is essentially autobiographical material, the same cannot be said for the Zuckerman novels. Roth himself has been very clear about this: Zuckerman is not a doppelgänger, and the critics who insist on viewing the fiction as a thinly veiled representation of “the facts” of Roth’s life elide the essential aim of the novels, which at its heart is different from that of autobiography. In an interview with Asher Z. Milbauer and Donald G. Watson, reprinted in the essay collection Reading Myself and Others, Roth takes pains to draw this distinction:

Though some readers may have trouble disentangling my life from Zuckerman’s, The Ghost Writer — along with the rest of Zuckerman Bound and The Counterlife — is an imaginary biography, an invention stimulated by themes in my experience to which I’ve given considerable thought but the result of a writing process a long way from the methods, let alone the purposes, of autobiography. If an avowed autobiographer transformed his personal themes into a detailed narrative embodying a reality distinct and independent from his own day-to-day history, peopled with imaginary characters conversing in words never spoken, given meaning by a sequence of events that had never taken place, we wouldn’t be surprised if he was charged with representing as his real life what was an outright lie.

Besides presaging Oprah Winfrey and l’affaire Frey, Roth’s comment is essential for understanding his method as a novelist, and it is a perfect gloss on one of the central themes in Exit Ghost: the inability — or unwillingness — of unsophisticated readers to separate the art from the artist, or, as Zuckerman puts it, “the deadly literal-mindedness and vulgarity that attributes everything to its source in a wholly stupid way.”

Much of Exit Ghost is concerned with the process of creating fiction out of lived experience, and throughout the novel Zuckerman insists on the importance of interpreting fiction through the prism of the fiction itself rather than attempting to impose some artificial correlation upon the fiction and the facts of a novelist’s life.

Unfolding over little more than a week at the outset of November 2004, the novel opens with Zuckerman returning to New York, the city he had fled eleven years previously after receiving a series of increasingly threatening anti-Semitic letters from an unknown correspondent. Zuckerman has spent the last eleven years secluded in a house on a mountain in western Massachusetts; now recovering from prostate surgery that has left him impotent and incontinent, he returns to the big city for a consultation with a urologist who has suggested that there is a procedure that might take care of the latter problem, if not the former.

During his stay in New York, Zuckerman has three interconnected encounters with figures who dredge up events and emotions from his past. The first involves Amy Bellette, whom Zuckerman first met in 1956 when he was an overnight guest at the home of E.I. Lonoff, a famous short-story writer who was Zuckerman’s literary hero as a youth. (That story is told in Roth’s 1979 novel, The Ghost Writer, the first Roth book to feature Zuckerman as a protagonist; its titular echo in the current novel is not at all accidental.) Bellette, who was twenty-seven when Zuckerman first met her, is now seventy-five, and is herself disfigured as the result of surgery to remove a cancerous brain tumour.

The second encounter is with Billy Davidoff and Jaimie Logan, a couple in their early thirties who want to swap houses with someone outside the city for a year. Jamie, a burgeoning writer whose first story was published in The New Yorker, has been shaken by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and wants to flee the city, which she perceives as a target, for the safer environs of rural New England. When he answers their ad in The New York Review of Books, Zuckerman finds himself captivated by Jamie’s youthful beauty, and begins to experience the kind of erotic feelings he hasn’t had in over a decade.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Zuckerman is thrown on a collision course with Richard Kliman, a young literary upstart who has managed to acquire the first half of an unpublished Lonoff manuscript — the only novel the writer ever produced — that contains what Kliman thinks is a shattering secret about the deceased writer — a secret that Kliman wants to exploit for a tell-all biography of Lonoff.

Kliman, whose pious avowals of wanting to resurrect the reputation of a neglected author serve to mask his craven desire to profit off of a dead man’s scandal — a scandal that may indeed amount to nothing more than salacious gossip — is anathema to Zuckerman; the more persistently Kliman attempts to engage the older writer, the more furiously Zuckerman works to sabotage his nemesis. This antagonistic relationship turns the mentor/adoring acolyte relationship in The Ghost Writer on its head, but it also entrenches Roth’s own stated distinction between fiction and autobiography, and the concomitant warning not to confuse the two. “Spare me the lecture about the impenetrable line dividing fiction from reality,” Kliman sneers late in the novel. “This is something Lonoff lived through. This is a tormented confession disguised as a novel.” Zuckerman replies: “Unless it’s a novel disguised as a tormented confession.”

In case the reader is in doubt as to how the process of fictionalizing lived experience works in practice, Roth helpfully provides us with a practical example woven into the schema of the novel itself. Zuckerman’s encounters with Jamie are fraught with the writer’s longing for her — for her youthfulness, her beauty, her brazen intelligence — but behind this longing is the untenable fact of his impotence. The only kind of consummation the writer can possibly achieve with the younger woman is to return to his hotel room after visiting with her and write down the encounters as he imagines they might have occurred.

What develops is a dramatic pas de deux entitled He and She; the fictionalized dialogues have the same broad trajectories as the actual meetings, but the imagined interchanges read very differently: they are more raw, more honest, more explicitly sexual. In fictionalizing his relationship with Jamie, Zuckerman finds himself able to verbalize all the things he wishes he could say to the real woman, and to have her respond in the way he would like for her to respond to him. The Jamie of He and She has little to do with the actual wife of Billy Davidoff, and everything to do with the imaginative creation of the tormented Zuckerman.

If the actual exchanges between Zuckerman and Jamie display all the faults that Zuckerman identified in Roth’s autobiography — they are kind, discreet, and careful — their dramatic counterparts are anything but. They embody what Roth spoke of as the transformation of a novelist’s “personal themes into a detailed narrative embodying a reality distinct and independent from his own day-to-day history, peopled with imaginary characters conversing in words never spoken, given meaning by a sequence of events that had never taken place.” He and She becomes its own argument against Kliman’s stubborn literalism, and a cautionary note for any reader who might be tempted to ape it.

Exit Ghost — the title derives from a stage direction in Hamlet — is about many things: the dissolution of the body and the mind associated with aging, the divergent perspectives of the old and the young, the terror of engaging with the world as opposed to the blissful oblivion of leaving the world behind to live on a mountain in Massachusetts. But beyond and beneath all that, it is about the process of novel writing — about the acute dangers of creating a fictional universe that is all too easily mistaken for the novelist’s own. It is about readers and writers, about understanding and misunderstanding, about the exquisitely painful experience of focusing one’s own life in all its pain onto the page, and exaggerating it, distorting it, in the noble endeavour of grasping a larger artistic truth. Although he’d doubtless deny it, one can almost see Roth peeking out from behind the guise of his longtime narrator when he has Zuckerman proclaim:

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.

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