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. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jamie. 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 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."
BOOK REVIEWS
Media Reviews
"Roth's voice is wise and full of rueful wit, but the plot is contrived ... and the tone hovers dangerously close to pathetic." - PW.
" While not one of Roth's strongest works, this novel has all the elements: unreliable narrators, authorial games, meditations on the use and abuse of literature, and a firm grounding in the reality of post-9/11 New York." - Library Journal.
"Starred Review. [A]gonizingly real yet gorgeously rendered..." - Booklist.
Philip Roth's 28th book is apparently the final of 9 novels in the Zuckerman series, which began in 1979 with The Ghostwriter.
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