Exit Ghost

We've got us one of the first of what will be many, many reviews of Roth's new novel. The NY Sun:

Nathan Zuckerman, the most maddening and cunning of Philip Roth's alter egos, has always been defined by his refusal to learn. To mature, to grow up, to grow wise—to Zuckerman these aren't just impossibilities, they are delusions, the lullabies we sing ourselves to drown out the voice of desire, which is the one real voice. All of Mr. Roth's incarnations share this trait to some degree—whether he is called Zuckerman or Portnoy or Kepesh or Sabbath, the Philip Roth hero is defined by being ineducable.

But the Zuckerman novels present the antinomian challenge of Mr. Roth's fiction most clearly, because Zuckerman, like Mr. Roth, is a novelist, and the idea of an ineducable novelist is especially goading. Isn't a novelist supposed to see more of life than the rest of us, and to master it through his art? To be at once a great writer, like Philip Roth, and a roaring id, like Nathan Zuckerman, is therefore more than a paradox: it is an existential menace. If the artist who sees most learns least, then his art cannot console. Zuckerman offers an anti-catharsis: we leave our encounters with him angrier and more confused than before.

"Exit Ghost" (Hougton Mifflin, 304 pages, $26) Roth's latest book, is the ninth Zuckerman novel, by the publisher's reckoning.

Also see The Quarterly Conversation's coverage of Exit Ghost.