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"Exit Ghost" by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin, ISBN 0618915478, $26.00)
 
The note on the back of the advance reading copy describes this novel as "The last ordeal of Nathan Zuckerman, the indomitable literary adventurer of Roth's nine Zuckerman books."
 
One of Zuckerman's initial ordeals, unfortunately, is coping with his ongoing post-prostate cancer maintenance, and the narrator does not go out of his way to put a positive spin on the condition. The fun of reading Zuckerman, though, has always been found in going along with the no-holds-barred negativity. (In truth, once you've read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," Zuckerman's dilemmas seem almost benign.) I went right through this book in a couple of days. Some reviewers may eventually get around to complaining that the plot lacks plausibility in a couple of places, but this was not enough to deter me from the pleasures to be found in the sentence by sentence authority of Zuckerman's voice.
 
At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist has been living in his cabin, largely withdrawn from society and working on his writing, for several years. He heads down to New York to see about a medical procedure, and here's what he says on arrival: "What surprised me most my first few days walking around the city? The most obvious thing--the cell phones. We had no reception as yet up on my mountain, and down in Athena, where they do have it, I'd rarely see people striding the streets talking uninhibitedly into their phones. I remembered a New York when the only people walking up Broadway seemingly talking to themselves were crazy. What had happened in these ten years for there suddenly to be so much to say--so much so pressing that it couldn't wait to be said? Everywhere I walked, somebody was approaching me talking on a phone and someone was behind me talking on a phone. Inside the cars, the drivers were on the phone. When I took a taxi, the cabbie was on the phone. For one who frequently went without talking to anyone for days at a time, I had to wonder what that had previously held them up had collapsed in people to make incessant talking into a telephone preferable to walking about under no one's surveillance, momentarily solitary, assimilating the streets through one's animal senses and thinking the myriad thoughts that the activities of a city inspire. For me it made the streets appear comic and the people ridiculous."
 
This passage conveys one of the book's main points as Zuckerman increasingly sees himself as a man from another time. Along that line, an earlier Zuckerman novel, "The Ghostwriter," comes heavily into play as the narrator reunites with characters and themes from that work, thereby meditating fully on his life in a world where, as he sits in a luncheonette, he says, "At the moment I looked up, every one of them was talking on a cell phone. Why did those phones seem like the embodiment of everything I had to escape? They were an inevitable technological development, and yet, in their abundance, I saw the measure of how far I had fallen away from the community of contemporary souls. I don't belong here anymore, I thought. My membership has lapsed. Go."
 
Review by Todd Robins, September 20, 2007

 

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