Exit Ghost - Hardcover

Roth, Philip

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022408173X ISBN 13: 9780224081733

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2007

Synopsis

Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age. Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. They will flee post-9/11 Manhattan for his country refuge, and he will return to city life. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jaime, whose allure draws him back to all that

he thought he had left behind: intimacy, the vibrant play of heart and body.

The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman's youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman's first literary hero, E.I. Lonoff. The once irresistible Amy is now an old woman depleted by illness, guarding the memory of that grandly austere American writer who showed Nathan the solitary path to a writing vocation. The third connection is with Lonoff's would-be biographer, a young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff's "great secret". Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.

Haunted by Roth's earlier works - the melancholy comedy of The Ghost Writer, the counterpoint of the imaginary and the real in The Counterlife, the distinctive dialogues of Deception - Exit Ghost is a reminder of Roth's incomparable style and themes and an amazing leap into yet another

phase in this great writer's insatiable commitment to fiction.

About this title

Review

'another virtuoso performance by Roth - funny, angry, and very much in tune with the tenuousness of all desires and needs'
-- Independent

`America's greatest living novelist. His books are the most anticipated literary events on both sides of the Atlantic'. -- Sunday Times

`Consistently enthralling...full of tart humour and dancing intelligence' -- Literary Review

`Everything Roth writes is a blessing for which his devotees are grateful' -- Independent on Sunday

`Nobody who has followed him - one of the great writers of our time - thus far, should miss it' -- Scotsman

`Rich with tragicomic possibilities' -- Guardian

`Roth is a writer's writer, and one for intelligent readers too'
-- Sunday Herald

`There is something magnificent about Philip Roth's undimmed rage and life-lust' -- The Sunday Telegraph

`This is a book about the importance of literature that lasts' -- The Telegraph

`its sentences ring with vitality... Roth reminds us why "the transforming exigencies of prose fiction" still matter' -- Mail on Sunday, October 14, 2007

Book Description

The incomparable master Roth retutns with the final Zuckerman book.

Edition details

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 022408173X
• ISBN 13: 9780224081733
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304