A review by timsa9cd0
Exit Ghost by Philip Roth

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.