Exit Ghost: Book summary and reviews of Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

Exit Ghost Summary

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."

Exit Ghost 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.

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Philip Roth Author Biography

Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933. He attended Rutgers University before receiving his B.A. at Bucknell and his M.A. from the University of Chicago. He served in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1956. He has taught English at a number of universities including the University of Pennsylvania where he was writer-in-residence for fifteen years. Philip Roth's first book, Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, was published in 1959 and won the National Book Award for fiction. Patrimony (1991) was the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Operation Shylock (1993) of the PEN/Faulkner Award, Sabbath's Theater (1995) of the National Book Award. Philip Roth lives in Connecticut; American Pastoral was his twentieth...

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