Roth, as usual, renders all of this starkly and powerfully. Death, here, doesn’t come quickly it is heralded by scars and tumors and soaking wet diapers. It is embarrassing and demoralizing, depressing and degrading. In both instances, death comes off poorly: It is ugly. Roth writes straightforwardly about death, doling it out both on its own terms and in relation to the living. The book focuses on three people who are either dead or dying, pitting them against three more in the prime of their lives. Just state it plainly.'Īnd this, unfortunately, is just what Roth proceeds to do. As one character puts it: 'The end is so immense, it is its own poetry.

At funerals, though, we tend to emphasize the beauty of the life lived and to gloss over the often-difficult end.

A Novel Novel?Įxit Ghost, in a sense, is Zuckerman’s funeral. He is a 'not yet' to Zuckerman’s 'no longer.' Zuckerman, along with the dying Bellette, sets about thwarting Kliman’s literary aspirations. He is the competition: both for the girl and (because of his youthful virility) for life itself. Handsome, self-assured and young, Kliman immediately raises Zuckerman’s hackles. Zuckerman is quickly smitten with the beautiful Jamie–blue-blooded scion of Texas oil money–and, deep in the throes of a sexual reawakening, he hopes to woo her away from her sweet and devoted husband.Īs it turns out, Jamie’s college sweetheart, Robert Kliman, is writing a biography of the long-dead Lonoff. On a whim, Zuckerman agrees to swap houses for a year with Billy and Jamie, a young writer couple looking to escape Manhattan after 9/11.

Now Bellette, who in the intervening years had been Lonoff’s mistress, is dying of brain cancer. In short order, Zuckerman spots Amy Bellette (a central character in the first Zuckerman book, The Ghost Writer), who had so entranced him five decades earlier during an evening spent at the home of Zuckerman’s mentor, the renowned author E.I. Zuckerman’s memory is going, too, and he is reduced to keeping a log of conversations and commitments in a marble notebook like the ones children use in grade school. Set in New York City, Exit Ghost begins a few days before the 2004 presidential elections, when Zuckerman–a well-known novelist who for more than a decade has lived a solitary existence in the Berkshires–returns to Manhattan for a procedure he hopes will improve the incontinence that has dogged him since prostate cancer surgery several years earlier.

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