Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books

by Claudia Roth Pierpont

  Newly roused, Zuckerman travels to New York to undergo a medical procedure that offers a chance of alleviating the incontinence that, along with impotence, he has endured since his prostate surgery nine years earlier, and that has become his major reason for keeping to himself. (There is nothing to be done about the impotence, and his memory seems to be failing, but getting out of diapers is a good opening shot at renewal.) Once he is in New York, walking the streets like Rip Van Winkle and grumbling about the ubiquity of cell phones, he discovers that “New York did what it does to people—awakened the possibilities. Hope breaks out.”

  Exit Ghost, published in 2007, is a sequel to Roth’s novel of 1979, The Ghost Writer. Zuckerman shows no signs of remembering his interludes with Swede Levov or Ira Ringold or Coleman Silk, but he has never forgotten E. I. Lonoff, dead now for more than forty years, or the mysterious girl, Amy Bellette, whom he imagined as Anne Frank during a snowy night he spent at Lonoff’s house in 1956. He was twenty-three. Instantly infatuated. The face. The voice, with its slight, untraceable accent. It’s a voice he hears again almost as soon as he steps onto the elevator after leaving his urologist’s office, at Mount Sinai Hospital, although the woman herself is unrecognizable. Amy Bellette is seventy-five, and, as Zuckerman discovers when he follows her to a nearby luncheonette, she has had brain surgery: taking off her hat, she reveals that one side of her head has been shaved and bears a raw serpentine scar running from behind her ear to her brow. What appeared to be a thin blue summer dress is a hospital gown that she has outfitted with buttons and a rope-like belt. Zuckerman decides to leave her in peace, although a complex series of events will soon bring them together, as Roth revisits and revises the earlier novel’s large if airily borne concerns: youth and age, art and life, the flamboyance of the imagination and the claims of literature. All during the course of a single week, in the fall of 2004, while the city is reeling over the reelection of George W. Bush.

  In the flush of the promise of physical renewal, Zuckerman impulsively answers an ad and agrees to swap his mountain retreat for an Upper West Side apartment, then goes to meet the young married pair of writers, Billy and Jamie Logan, who live there. Billy is boyish, modest, and deferential. Jamie is thirty years old, tall and slender, with a curtain of dark hair and a languid air. Zuckerman is seventy-one. Instantly infatuated. The face. The voice, with its slight, untraceable accent. (Texas, old money.) Jamie Logan isn’t just a beauty: she speaks rapidly and quietly, “as highly complicated people will do.” She might have stirred Zuckerman unbearably even had he touched a woman in the past eleven years, even had he not strenuously deprived himself of the sight of pleasures beyond his reach, before she presented him with all those pleasures in a single package, wrapped in a thousand-dollar cashmere sweater open to reveal a lacy camisole that looks surprisingly—he’s been away from women’s fashion also for eleven years—like lingerie. “Her breasts,” he notes, “weren’t those of an undernourished woman.” Jamie is imperfect enough to seem utterly real—she has problems with her parents, worries about her writing, and doesn’t know how to use “hopefully”—yet perfect enough to be slightly annoying. (When, on first reading the book, I sniffily complained to Roth about “overprivileged” Jamie, he gleefully replied, “You should hear what she says about you!”)

  Ridiculous for him even to think about her, of course. But this is Nathan Zuckerman, for whom the threat of being ridiculous is catnip:

  There is no situation that infatuation is unable to feed on. Looking at her provided a visual jolt—I allowed her into my eyes the way a sword swallower swallows a sword.

  All too fittingly, Strauss’s Four Last Songs is on the couple’s CD player when he arrives, elegiac music for a soaring female voice written by a very old man. (Were they already listening to it, he wonders, or did she put it on just for him?) It is playing, too, in the dramatic scenario that Zuckerman writes after encounters with Jamie during the next few days: a duet for male and female voices, titled He and She, described as “a play of desire and temptation and flirtation and agony.” As the “agony” suggests, the play is not overtly sexual; the pair never touch. Instead, He and She discuss Conrad a good deal, and sometimes Hardy and a little Keats, as he begins to tell her what he feels and what he wants, and she replies as evasively as a flattered thirty-year-old woman can. Until their final exchange, which takes place on the telephone, when the tantalizingly young and desirable She suddenly announces (this is Zuckerman’s play, after all) that she is coming right over to his hotel room.

  Love and sex and flirtation and conversation and human warmth are not all that Zuckerman has renounced. Since 9/11, he has also sworn off newspapers, magazines, television news, and the consciousness of national events in any form. This is his way of preventing himself from becoming a “letter-to-the-editor madman,” always roaring about the ways in which “a wounded nation’s authentic patriotism” is being exploited by “an imbecilic king.” It’s his way of sparing himself “the despising without remission that constitutes being a conscientious citizen in the reign of George W. Bush.” He has paid his dues in political outrage. Not so Jamie and her husband, with whom he watches the election results while they field phone calls from friends as confidence turns to predictions of doom. These are choice historical hours that Roth has captured, when, in New York, violated idealism gave way to theatrical despair. (“This is now the night before it all got worse!” Jamie cries; reports the next day are of people crying on the steps of the Forty-second Street library.) The young couple can’t know what Zuckerman has learned, after living through the sixties assassinations, through Nixon, through Reagan. “It’s a flexible instrument that we’ve inherited,” he tells Jamie by way of reassurance. He follows with the most consoling words that he can summon about the country that has “enthralled” him for nearly three-quarters of a century: “It’s amazing how much punishment we can take.”

  Exit Ghost is not just about old age but about the mystification between young and old—between the “no-longers” and the “not-yets.” Mystification turns to antagonism when Roth confronts a subject that had attached to his later years as inevitably and about as pleasantly as death: biography. “It’s just the way it’s done now,” Amy Bellette tells Zuckerman. “To expose the writer to censure. To compose the definitive reckoning of every last misdoing. Destroying reputations is how these little nobodies make their little mark.” Amy has gotten in touch with Nathan in order to help her fend off a little nobody who is writing a biography of E. I. Lonoff, in which he intends to reveal a sexual transgression from Lonoff’s early years as the key to the great man’s work. Roth makes this newest of enemies as attractive as he can. Richard Kliman is twenty-eight years old, six feet three, handsome, virile (everything poor Zuckerman is not), and also reckless, smug, and blind with self-confidence: he is, in other words, Zuckerman concludes, “a passing rendition of me at about that stage,” while Zuckerman himself—the elder and famously isolated writer—has turned into Lonoff. Zuckerman curtly refuses to support Kliman’s project and tells him why: “Because the dirt-seeking snooping calling itself research is just about the lowest of literary rackets.” To which Kliman has the perfect Zuckermanian retort: “And the savage snooping calling itself fiction?”

  But there is no doubt about where the author’s sympathies lie. Or about who he thinks will win. Although Zuckerman manages to frustrate the biographer’s immediate scheme, he knows that, ultimately, there is little he will be able to do against the onslaught of “unknowing youth, savage with health and armed to the teeth with time.” It’s a stunning phrase, capturing the frightened, hunted feel of becoming old. The savageness of youth is built into the sound: the wicked kick at the end forces one to virtually spit out the alliterative joint of teeth and time. (The same alliteration works to much gentler but equally sensory effect in Mickey Sabbath’s memory of being a child on the Jersey Shore: “You could touch with your toes where America began.”)

  Elsewhere in the book, the
ease of the voice turns linguistic surprise into idioms so natural that you’re not sure they haven’t always existed: Jamie’s adoring husband describes her in terms that make Zuckerman think, “It was as though he were telling me about somebody he had dreamed up in jail.” Even the failure of words is eloquent. When Zuckerman is asked what it is like to be seventy, at a little birthday dinner given by his caretaker and his cook, at home in the country, he rises from his chair to tell them:

  “Think of the year 4000.” They smiled, as though I were about to crack a joke, and so I added, “No, no. Think seriously about 4000. Imagine it. In all its dimensions, in all its aspects. The year 4000. Take your time.” After a minute of sober silence, I quietly said to them, “That’s what it’s like to be seventy,” and sat back down.

  Time is the real subject of this book. The central love scene is not between Zuckerman and sexy Jamie but between Zuckerman and ravaged Amy Bellette—who suffers from the same disease and sports the same scar as Veronica Geng. The refashioned hospital gown, too, was Geng’s, a gesture of her ironic, in extremis whimsy. And Amy has Geng’s uncompromising passion for literature—it is her deepest bond with Zuckerman. This book is filled with ghosts. Near the end, Roth suspends the story for an eight-page disquisition on the extraordinary career and virtues of George Plimpton, whose death remains inconceivable to his old friend Zuckerman. It’s the kind of interruption that a younger writer probably wouldn’t dare, a formal disruption that pulls the story out of shape. But the pages on Plimpton are crucial: the original jacket cover was to have shown Plimpton himself, seated at the center of a party, in a restaurant. (It was changed because the photographer wanted too much money.) Plimpton is a force of life, like Zuckerman’s friend Larry Hollis at the book’s beginning. Both serve to amplify the questions that have driven Zuckerman since The Ghost Writer and that have now come to a crisis.

  Art or life? To sit at a desk all day and “turn sentences around,” as Lonoff did, as Zuckerman does, or to seek a livelier fate? The written world or the unwritten one? (“She: ‘What have you given up your life for, then?’ He: ‘I didn’t know I was giving it up.’”) For Zuckerman, Plimpton—“a playful, debonair, deeply inquisitive man of the world, a journalist, editor, and occasional film and television performer”—defined the life well lived. “When people say to themselves ‘I want to be happy,’ they could as well be saying ‘I want to be George Plimpton.’” (In some notes he made about the book, Roth compares Plimpton to the protagonist of Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors, named Lambert Strether, whose famous line is, “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.”) Zuckerman struggles to find the right word for the relation in which Plimpton stood to him: “What is the word I’m looking for? The antonym of doppelgänger.” The difference between them isn’t one of counterlives, because Plimpton’s life was never any kind of possibility for Zuckerman—or for Roth—no matter what choices he might have made.

  Intrinsic to Plimpton’s success and bonhomie is the fact that he was a member of “the monied Protestant hierarchy that had reigned over Boston and New York society,” Zuckerman states, “while my own poor ancestors were being ruled by rabbis in the ghettos of Eastern Europe.” Plimpton provided Zuckerman with his “first glimpse of privilege and its vast rewards”:

  He seemingly had nothing to escape, no flaw to hide or injustice to defy or defect to compensate for or weakness to overcome or obstacle to circumvent, appearing instead to have learned everything and to be open to everything altogether effortlessly.

  Entirely unlike Zuckerman, brought up to a life of unstinting diligence. Reverse the Plimpton formula—everything to escape, flaws to hide, injustice to defy—and one has a fair idea of the driving forces behind Plimpton’s own “antonym of a doppelgänger,” Zuckerman: the Jewish writer who signed his life away to work. But Plimpton’s death is a great reproach to Zuckerman. He’s suddenly ashamed of his long retreat, and, filled with regret for “all that I had squandered,” he swears a new responsibility to life. He will stay in New York, in the turmoil, in the moment, in the drama.

  And then, some twenty-five pages later, he packs his bag and flees. Because the urological procedure did not succeed, because his memory seems to be getting worse, and because even in his fantasy of Jamie coming to his hotel room, what can he do with her when she arrives? (How much humiliation can one man bear?) Zuckerman ends He and She with He tearing out just as She is on her way—and by the time he writes it, he’s back at home. It’s a sorrowful ending for him, restored to his isolated cabin on a gray November morning and looking out from his desk over the silent, snow-dusted road. Roth reports himself rather pleased at having dispatched his best creature so cruelly. But there are some rare souls who believe that Zuckerman has made the better choice, and, in his heart, Roth seems to be one of them. In an interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, published in 1981, two years after The Ghost Writer, he said, “Art is life too, you know. Solitude is life, meditation is life, pretending is life, supposition is life, contemplation is life, language is life. Is there less life in turning sentences around than in manufacturing automobiles?” Or as Zuckerman puts it in Exit Ghost: “The unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most.”

  Forging Ahead

  And so “to forge ahead, into the twilight of my talent”: Zuckerman, toward the end of Exit Ghost, is worried about having written a new book that is not quite satisfactory but that he finds himself unable to improve. Roth was seventy-four when Exit Ghost was published, to generally enthusiastic reviews (James Wood, in The New Yorker, called it “intricate, artful, and pressing”) in the fall of 2007. He, too, was worried about how to forge ahead. He was writing the same number of hours every day, but he no longer had the mental stamina for a bigger book. After about six months, he says—rather than the usual two years or so that he worked on a book—he couldn’t “complicate things any further.” He had already completed another book, a short work that took just about five months, titled Indignation, but he wasn’t sure how he felt about it, and, the summer before the release of Exit Ghost, he was going over it again and again. The criticism of some of the people he regularly relied on for initial feedback—by this time, I was one of them—underlined his worries. He had been hoping to add another big scene, but it wasn’t working. Zuckerman, facing the same kind of problem, appeals to the contrasting examples of two of his heroes: Hemingway—who put aside any manuscript he couldn’t finish to his satisfaction, either to work on later or to leave unpublished—and Faulkner, who gave every book his best and then, whatever the level of personal satisfaction, sent it out into the world to yield to readers whatever rewards it could. Zuckerman chooses Faulkner’s way, and so did Roth. “This is the scale it is,” he said about Indignation, and let it go.

  Indignation is a modest but intense book and betrays none of its author’s uncertainties. The writing is sure, simple, quickly moving. The fictional stakes are very high. The first sentence brings us simultaneously into the beginnings of the Korean War, in June 1950, and into the college career of the young protagonist, Marcus Messner. The war is not merely a backdrop. The following year, Marcus transfers from a local Newark college to rural Winesburg, in Ohio—Roth had read a new edition of Sherwood Anderson’s stories just as he was starting to write—hundreds of miles from the insistent supervision of his father, whose fears for his only son’s well-being have become intolerable. At Winesburg, Marcus enrolls in ROTC and abides strictly by the rules; his greatest concern is to avoid any trouble that could get him expelled and make him eligible for the draft. The components of the story are, of course, familiar: Newark, a school very much like Bucknell—with the same mandatory chapel attendance—and the interfering father. But the book’s energy springs from the first youthful protagonist that Roth had attempted in some time. Innocent, brash, and, in fact, overwhelmed with indignation at any perceived injustice, Marcus, at nineteen, is younger and more raw even than Nathan Zuckerman when he ca
me on the scene.

  But Marcus is not Nathan Zuckerman, and Indignation is not a comedy, although it has many comic moments, most of them the result of Marcus’s unknowing earnestness. Marcus’s father is a kosher butcher, and Marcus grew up helping out in the shop; his story is steeped in blood from beginning to end. He will not become a writer, because he will not live long enough for the possibility to dawn on him. He is a wholly believable figure and, in his desperately proud and confused youth, rather heartbreaking (without ever being sentimentalized). The characters around him, though, are less credible: their motivations are obscure, and none seem designed to do much more than advance the story. Yet the book moves forward like a missile on a carefully plotted trajectory. Unable to provide the kind of accumulative detail that he had long considered basic to “the moral texture of fiction,” Roth developed other methods. Indignation has the quality of a Voltairean moral fable, a latter-day Candide. It might be classified, with The Dying Animal and Everyman, as a conte philosophique—and, the most harrowing of the three, it could be subtitled A Soldier’s Tale.

  Roth tells the story from Marcus’s point of view, in the first person, even though—as Marcus himself tells us some fifty pages into the book—he has been killed in battle. Death, it seems, does not eliminate memory; death seems to be nothing but memory. And so Marcus, for eternity, is remembering all the trivial missteps and happenstances that got him where he is: his first sexual experience (Roth makes the advent of the blowjob on the American campus seem a vital aspect of the country’s social history); an argument with a roommate; a couple of tense meetings with the college dean of men; a campus snowstorm that unleashes the pent-up energies of several hundred sexually frustrated frat boys and turns into a riotous panty raid in bloodstained snow; Marcus’s refusal to attend chapel services and his being caught paying another student to forge his name on the chapel attendance sheet. It’s a brief history of meaningless infractions. Yet somehow, cumulatively, these events have led him to a numbered hill on a spiny ridge in central Korea, covered with corpses and more blood than he has seen since boyhood visits with his father to the local slaughterhouse.