The Ghost Writer Book

I read Roth when I was in my late teens and early twenties, and only returned to reading him in recent years. I thought The American Trilogy was amazing, as was The Plot Against America. The Ghost Writer is the first of ten books narrated by the autobiographically-oriented narrator Nathan Zuckerman, and first in the four-book Zuckerman Bound series. It depicts young short story writer Nathan visiting his literary hero I. E. Lonoff (supposedly a combination of Bernard Malamud and Henry Roth, two writers Roth himself idolized as a young writer).

Nathan has published four stories at this early time in his career, and because of the early buzz gets invited to stay overnight at Lonoff's house, where he finds his hero morose and a little resentful of the writing life, having published seven books but is, ugh, always working all the time. His wife also resents Lonoff's relentless focus on his craft to the exclusion of real life. Quite a bit of the focus of the early book is on the writing life, discussions between the earnest young Nathan and his somewhat jaded, newly adopted mentor.

Lonoff says, speaking somewhat unromantically of the writing life: "I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again. . ."

I liked all that writing life talk quite a bit. I was initially less enamored with the focus on Jewish-Writer identity, and Zuckerman's obsession with sex. Early on when I read him I loved his funny college-age lust stories in works such as Portnoy's Complaint and Goodbye Columbus and Other Stories. Now, having Roth reflect back on those libidinous years via Zuckerman is a little annoying for me, though this may also just be an effect of my age. This is a common issue in Roth books, though, and can get tiresome, though he can be quite self-deprecatingly funny about it at times, too.

So 1/3 of the way in the book I thought it was a merely good book, well-written, by one of our greatest living writers. And then it really took off, and the dialogue really begins to sing, as it can in the best of Roth's works! Zuckerman's writing gets him in conflict with his own family, which makes him initially resentful of his Newark family and his parents's harping on his responsibility to his Jewish heritage.

Then the identity of a (Jewish) woman who is a guest in the Lonoff home turns him around again, making him question anew issues of the responsibility of the writer to his writing, to life, family, and cultural identity. I'm not going to say anything specific about that woman, but it is a surprising and wonderful turn of events that elevates the novel to a new level. In the end I very much liked it. Yeah, I was seduced by Roth, and Zuckerman. A great start to the series and surely one of the best books of one of the best American authors.