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timsa9cd0's review against another edition
5.0
Zuckerman is 71. Returns to NYC for a week seeking medical help with his prostrate cancer fallout. The incontinence, the impotence. Bush is reelected. He rashly trades his place on the pond, with the herons, for Jamie and her husband's apt. And he comes into contact with Amy ?, Lonoff's lover for 4 years before he died, forty years ago. Amy, suffering from brain cancer and the surgery that scrambled it. And the would be biographer of Lonoff and the incest of Lonoff and his sister. And a dead George Plimpton. And the death of literature, a ghost that is now merely a setup for the critics who disguise their lust for the secrets of the author and not a love of reading and thinking about the novels, not the writer, as an “interest in art”. Does it add up? I sure don't know, but Roth offers so many observations on who we are, what we do, what we don't do. I can't get enough of him, even if I'll never read Joseph Conrad's short sea stories. Thank god for the great writers and their books.
guiltyfeat's review against another edition
4.0
I haven't read any Roth for a couple of years and this was a good one to come back to. Still concerned with writing, with his legacy, with his mortality, Zuckerman in his last has never been a more transparently, ghostly version of his creator.
edwarde3ddd's review against another edition
5.0
I've read half a dozen books by Roth and none of them have disappointed. This one deals mainly with the consequences of aging for Nathan Zuckerman as he deals with the health consequences of surviving prostate cancer and is approached by a would be biographer of one of his favorite, yet largely forgotten, authors. He also deals with his infatuation of a much younger woman and the changing meaning of desire when he has the inability to act on these physically.
kristinaskliffnotes's review against another edition
3.0
I think I need to start from the beginning of this series.
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