The Ghost Writer
"Why is there no way but this for me to fill my heart?"
For I had come, you see, to submit myself for candidacy as nothing less than E.I. Lonoff’s spiritual son, to petition for his moral sponsorship and to win, if I could, the magical protection of his advocacy and love.
Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer
For the rest of his life, Philip Roth would act and behave as a persecuted writer. Not for being a Jew, but for revealing their secrets and satirizing them. For writing unhinged fiction people felt betrayed the trust of the people who loved him, the Jewish People, Americans, and Israel. He could never escape his most popular book Portnoy’s Complaint, harassed on the streets of New York and banned from ever buying liver again.
How he dealt with it was through the creation of the Nathan Zuckerman character. He is the milder version of both Roth and Portnoy serving as the protagonist/narrator for his two famous trilogies Zuckerman Bound (The Prague Orgy making it a Quartet later) and The American Trilogy. It’s a brilliant move from a writer whose works are like a motorcycle counterbalancing the hefty controversy by maintaining a breakneck pace and a mind tearing everything apart looking for something to stand on. At top speeds, his novels purr like an Arabian Stallion a balance that a lesser rider would be unable to achieve but when his novels get too bogged down by his egocentricity then it’s like driving a dead dolphin.
If it were just Roth writing it would seem like he was defending himself on stage but since it’s Zuckerman, he can use his alter-ego to take the flak while he sets the stage, hell he can become the stage director and before you know it people are paying him money just to get into his theater and argue with him on his stage. While they are telling Roth how much he sucks, he is just sitting there with pen and paper as he uses you for his next book. This is the ridiculousness of life where a writer claims he isn’t really Jewish— while writing controversial books about himself as a Jewish author who claims he really isn’t Jewish and occasionally goes to Israel to make claims to the Jews that he isn’t really Jewish until a fellow Jew tells him “What makes you a normal Jew, Nathan is how you are rived by Jewish abnormality.” It’s all engineered so any controversy just made his star brighter.
The Ghost Writer is the first of the Zuckerman trilogy and our first introduction to Zuckerman. Nathan Zuckerman is the classic Bildungsroman protagonist. A young and naïve man who intuits that the world can be much more real than it is and that he can get there if only he can produce the father guidance of the mystical literary master, E.I. Lonoff.
Zuckerman is Roth at the start of his career before the writing of Portnoy’s Complaint. Like Roth, he has ruffled the Jewish community with a couple of short stories they believe the Goyim will not understand and will read only to laugh and perpetuate the stereotype of the greedy and money-loving Jew, the Shylock. By writing this way he has already offended Father and Rabbi, this is similar to the reception of Roth’s first work, a collection of short stories Goodbye, Columbus.
Lonoff is Roth as he is now, or perhaps as he imagines being….tamer….in the future, or maybe as he wishes to be seen. He is calm, cool, and collected, and has none of that bubbling problem with women that Roth has. He writes books about nobodies from nowhere, away from homes where they are not missed, yet desperate to return without delay. The fame of the writing career has forced Lonoff to become a Jew in exile. Living in New England, in the mountains and vibrant nature away from his people and the vacuous desert. The whole setup is reminiscent of Roberto Bolaño’s excellent short story Sensini.
Lonoff needs peace and solitude to write. What this means is he needs to be bored out of his mind. To achieve that end will require stillness, separation, the same bland foods, the same walk with paths trodden over by his own feet throughout the decades, and the same wife.
Like Sensini, there is a young woman, a “daughter” who is creating a rift. She has all the attributes that drive Roth/Zuckerman mad. A clear and striking figure, obvious talent in the arts but stained with poor image problems due to trauma at the hands of drink, or a father, or a drinking father. In this woman’s case, her trauma is one we have seen before because we all have read it. That woman is Anne Frank and she survived World War II and now she has more problems. Now she has to deal with being a household name and still an aspiring writer. How on earth will she top that diary?
Lonoff who is probably sleeping with Ms. Frank, feels he cannot betray his wife completely. If he says yes to living with Ms. Frank then his heart will explode with happiness and then how could he write? Like Fernando Pessoa real life is a passing light show that fuels his creativity and his passion for real estate is only in imaginary places.
His big piece of advice to Zuckerman is that he is a nice person in person but a real son of a bitch on paper. He needs strife and toil if he wants to create real works of art. Roth is giving Roth permission to move past the parody exaggeration of Portnoy’s Stockholm Family Insanity and into the sadoanarchist-nihilist despair of Mickey Sabbath.
I can’t help but laugh at a Philip Roth novel that begins the trajectory of nine or so novels that he would be famous for, the reader must have been impressed by his restraint, Zuckerman seems nice and didn’t say too many bad things mostly keeping the controversy to writing, the new woman seems like quite an interesting romantic love interest maybe he really developed a new perspective on the whole Judea thing…
“I met a marvelous young woman while I was in New England. I love her and she loves me. We are to be married.”
“Married. But so fast? Nathan is she Jewish?”
“Yes, she is.”
“But who is she?”
“Anne Frank.”
Philip Roth
The Ghost Writer
See you got to get it up to speed if you want it to purr.
Impressively, Roth turned his whole life into fiction to keep writing it...