Exit Ghost

by Philip Roth Narrated by George Guidall

Overview

Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York in the long-awaited final installment of Philip Roth's renowned Zuckerman series. Alone for eleven years on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age. Walking the streets of New York after so many years away, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.

Editorial Reviews

Clive James

Exit Ghost is just too fascinating to leave alone…this book is latter-day Roth at his intricately thoughtful best…
—The New York Times Book Review

Michael Dirda

This being Philip Roth, Exit Ghost manages some occasional laughter in the dark…and, again, this being Philip Roth, the novel is sometimes brutally sexual (the description of Jamie's past, whether imagined or actual). Above all, though, the book shows us a man trying to work with the cards that fate has dealt him—and to accommodate himself to the diminution of his mental and physical powers. In this struggle, any of us can see our own destinies, whether we are "no-longers" or "not-yets." As Leon Trotsky, no less, said with simple truth: "Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man."
—The Washington Post

Michiko Kakutani

Mr. Roth has created a melancholy, if occasionally funny, meditation on aging, mortality, loneliness and the losses that come with the passage of time…Compared with Mr. Roth's big postwar trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain), which unfolded into a bold chronicle of American innocence and disillusionment, this volume is definitely a modest undertaking, but it has a sense of heartfelt emotion lacking in Everyman and Dying Animal, and for fans of the Zuckerman books, it provides a poignant coda to Nathan's story, putting a punctuation point to his journey from youthful idealism and passion through midlife confusion and angst toward elderly renunciation.
—The New York Times

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171109424
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	05/09/2008
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

I walked to West 71st Street, startled, at Columbus Circle, to see that the bulky fortress of the Coliseum had metamorphosed into a pair of glass skyscrapers joined at the hip and lined at street level with swanky shops. I wandered into the arcade and out, and when I continued north on Broadway it was not so much that I felt myself in a foreign country but as though some optical trick were being played on me so that things appeared as in the reflection of a funhouse mirror, everything simultaneously familiar and unrecognizable. Not without some hardship, I'd conquered the solitary's way of life, knew its tests and satisfactions, and over time had shaped the scope of my needs to its limitations, long ago abandoning excitement, intimacy, adventure, and antagonisms in favor of quiet, steady, predictable contact with nature and reading and my work. Why invite the unanticipated, why court any more shocks or surprises than those that aging would be sure to deliver without my prompting? Yet I continued up Broadway, past the crowds at Lincoln Center that I did not wish to join, the theater complexes whose movies I had no inclination to see, the leather goods shops and gourmet food shops whose merchandise I didn't care to buy, unwilling to oppose the power of the crazed hope of rejuvenation that was affecting all my actions.

Videos