![]() ![]() ![]() Zuckerman travels to New York for an experimental, hardly guaranteed operation to help alleviate some of his troubles. But in Exit Ghost, it seems that enough is enough. Roth has portrayed his character - some would say alter ego - as accepting of this debilitation as a means to become a person solely focused upon his writing, a creature of work and nothing else. No longer sex-obsessed, no longer the distant observer of vice and virtue, Zuckerman is what he is - an old man, a tired man, a sick man, a hopeful man and, perhaps, a man still capable of love.įrom American Pastoral onwards, it has been known that Nathan Zuckerman is impotent and incontinent. In Exit Ghost, Zuckerman is old, in his seventies, and his health is failing. And the last we saw of him was throughout Roth's great ‘90s trilogy, the 'American trilogy,' where he acted less as a protagonist and more as an observer, a chronicler of American life during some of its most turbulent times. ![]() ![]() We have seen him in his forties, sexually active, sexually obsessed. We have seen Zuckerman as a young author in his mid-twenties, anxious to be taken seriously, enamored with the writing lifestyle of Lonoff, a forgotten Jewish short story author. Exit Ghost is the ninth Nathan Zuckerman novel and, according to Philip Roth and his publishers, it will be the last. ![]()
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