The Ghost Writer

Nathan Zuckerman Begins

Nathan Zuckerman is 23, newly published, fleeing his family in Newark after writing a story they consider a betrayal. He visits E. I. Lonoff — a reclusive Jewish writer in the Berkshires, model of artistic integrity — seeking both guidance and, perhaps, permission. What he finds at Lonoff’s farmhouse is a marriage in quiet crisis and a young woman, Amy Bellette, who haunts him.

The novel’s central audacity is Zuckerman’s fantasy — presented as a kind of dream or wish — that Amy Bellette is Anne Frank, who survived and has been living in secret, watching the fame of her diary with complicated feelings. The fantasy is not presented as possible but as necessary: Zuckerman needs to understand what it would mean for a Jewish writer to claim the Holocaust as literary material, and Anne Frank is the unavoidable figure at the centre of that question.

The Zuckerman Sequence

The Ghost Writer was followed by Zuckerman Unbound (1981), The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and the novella The Prague Orgy — all collected as Zuckerman Bound (1985). The American Trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain) and Exit Ghost (2007) continued the sequence. Reading the novels in order reveals how Roth used Zuckerman to approach the questions of his career from different angles across four decades.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The Ghost Writer apart: The compression is extraordinary — every scene does multiple things simultaneously; The Anne Frank conceit is handled with genuine intellectual seriousness; and Lonoff is one of the great portraits of the reclusive artist in American fiction. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of The Ghost Writer give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Literary ambition is always complicated by the demands of community — the Newark Jewish community Zuckerman writes about cannot simply be material. The figure of Anne Frank looms over postwar Jewish-American writing as both subject and impossibility. The mentor-protege relationship in literature involves a fantasy of what the protege might become and anxiety about whether that becoming is possible. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Philip Roth’s prose in The Ghost Writer is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

The brevity means some readers want more development of the secondary characters. The Anne Frank section requires the reader to accept a fantasy sequence as literarily valid. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers of Philip Roth who want to follow the Nathan Zuckerman sequence from its beginning, or literary fiction readers interested in the novel-about-writing form.

Lonoff and the Reclusive Artist

E. I. Lonoff is one of American fiction’s most precise portraits of the artist who has chosen silence over engagement: a writer of acknowledged distinction who has retreated to a farmhouse in the Berkshires, turned down every invitation to participate in public literary life, and built his existence around the daily practice of a prose that is controlled to the point of self-erasure. He is, for young Zuckerman, an image of what integrity looks like when it has been pursued to its logical conclusion. The farmhouse, the wife, the routine, the famous refusal to comment on anything — these are the forms that artistic seriousness takes when it has decided that the world cannot be trusted with the work.

Roth did not model Lonoff on a single original, but readers have long suspected traces of Bernard Malamud, whose personal austerity and artistic integrity made him the closest thing American Jewish fiction had to a model of the reclusive master. Whether or not the resemblance is intended, Lonoff serves the same function in Zuckerman’s imagination: the mentor who embodies the possibility that serious art can be made in America, that the pressures of commercial success and communal obligation can be refused, that a writer can choose the work over everything else and survive the choice.

The Anne Frank Section

The fantasy sequence in which Zuckerman imagines Amy Bellette as Anne Frank is the novel’s most audacious formal move, and the one that has attracted the most sustained critical attention. The fantasy is not presented as possible — the novel is clear that it is Zuckerman’s imagining — but as necessary. What he needs to work through is the question of whether a Jewish writer can claim the Holocaust as literary material, what the relationship is between his own mild Newark sufferings and the historical catastrophe that hangs over the entire Jewish-American literary project.

Anne Frank is the unavoidable figure at the centre of this question because her diary is the most widely read first-person account of what the Holocaust looked like from the inside, and because the diary’s enormous popularity raised, for Jewish-American writers, the problem of following: what can a novelist from Newark possibly write that would not be dwarfed by what happened to her? Zuckerman’s fantasy — that she survived and is watching her fame with complicated feelings — is his attempt to put the question directly, to imagine the subject’s own perspective on her transformation into symbol.

Reading the Sequence

The Ghost Writer is the ideal entry point to Roth’s Zuckerman sequence, which runs across nine novels from 1979 to 2007 and constitutes one of the most sustained investigations of the relationship between a novelist’s life and his fiction in American literature. Zuckerman begins here as a young man full of literary ambition and communal anxiety; by Exit Ghost (2007) he is elderly, ill, and returning to New York after decades of reclusion. The development across the sequence — the way Roth uses Zuckerman to approach the questions of his career from different angles and different life stages — is one of the great achievements of postwar American fiction, and it begins in this small, perfect novel in the Berkshires.

The Verdict

Our rating: 4.1/5 — The compressed, perfect opening of the Zuckerman sequence: every scene doing multiple things, the Anne Frank conceit handled with genuine intellectual seriousness, Lonoff rendered as one of the great portraits of the reclusive artist in American fiction.