Exit Ghost

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Exit Ghost is a 2007 novel by Philip Roth, the ninth and last Nathan Zuckerman story. The plot follows Zuckerman as he returns to New York after eleven years in New England to undergo a medical procedure that might help his incontinence. In the city, he reconnects with Amy Bellette, whom he last met at writer E. I. Lonoff’s house in 1956, a memory from The Ghost Writer. He also agrees to a housing swap with a young couple, Billy Davidoff and Jamie Logan, and he quickly becomes attracted to Logan.

In his hotel room at night, Zuckerman writes a play, He and She, imagining conversations with Logan. Through Davidoff and Logan, he meets Richard Kliman, a brash Harvard graduate who is researching a biography of Lonoff. Kliman was Logan’s college boyfriend and is eager to uncover a potentially scandalous secret from Lonoff’s past. Because of Kliman’s insistence on pursuing the secret, neither Zuckerman nor Bellette wants to help him, and Zuckerman’s own mixed feelings about Logan and Kliman add to the tension.

Lonoff’s character in the book draws on multiple writers, with Henry Roth being a major influence. Roth’s biographer is Steven G. Kellman. It is noted that Philip Roth has read Henry Roth’s later writings, some of which were unpublished. In the novel, Lonoff’s own supposed incestuous affair with his sister—an issue that appeared in Henry Roth’s life as well—contributes to Lonoff’s long period of writer’s block and his reluctance to publish again.

American politics provides a backdrop to the story. The characters watch the results of the 2004 presidential election, with Logan furious and distraught while Zuckerman remains more philosophical and reflective.

The title, exit ghost, comes from stage directions found in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, and Julius Caesar. Roth explained in a BBC interview that he chose it after rereading Macbeth and being struck by the Banquo ghost. The title also nods to The Ghost Writer. In the novel, Jamie and Billy read Macbeth aloud and note its relevance to George W. Bush’s first term. Bellette also imagines Lonoff telling her, “Reading/writing people, we are finished, we are ghosts witnessing the end of a literary era.”

Critics received the book as elegiac and a kind of valedictory closing to The Ghost Writer, a melancholy but also funny meditation on aging, mortality, loneliness, and the losses that time brings.