The final curtain?

This is the ninth and final volume of the sequence, eliding fiction and autobiography, in which Philip Roth’s alter ego Nathan Zuckerman is narrator and protagonist. In the first volume, The Ghost Writer (1979), the still emergent author makes a pilgrimage of homage to a literary veteran,

E. I. Lonoff, once highly praised for a novel of Jewish life and then all but forgotten when he puzzlingly fails to produce the expected successor. Lonoff enjoys a ménage à trois with a long-suffering wife and a mysterious foreign woman, Amy, his student and muse, to whom Zuckerman is instantly attracted and whom he half believes to be Anna Frank, living incognito in America.

Now in Exit Ghost (stage direction from Hamlet), the series comes full circle. A mordantly characterised Zuckerman, dilapidated survivor of prostate cancer, returns to New York after 11 years of devoting himself to monotony in a New England mountain retreat, to face not merely a wholly changed world, on which he makes the sort of searching, scathing comments that Roth himself might make, but also disconcerting and even alarming reminders of the pilgrimage of so many years ago.

Before long a pushy biographer, a reincarnation of Henry James’s ‘publishing scoundrel’ in The Aspern Papers, is badgering him to collaborate in the shabby endeavour of revealing the secret behind Lonoff’s abandonment of writing. Zuckerman also encounters in a café a frail, elderly woman, whom he gradually recognises as the once desirable ‘Anna Frank’. It turns out that she is now terminally ill with a brain tumour. In the mental confusion caused by her illness she has already passed to the biographer half of a novel written by Lonoff, which seems to confirm not merely the existence but also the nature of the old man’s secret.