Exit Ghost (Vintage International) by Philip Roth
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Book Reviews of Exit Ghost (Vintage International)
Book Review: A Testosterone-Age Writer's Narcisistic Fantasies
Summary: 1 Stars
In this short novel, Philip Roth exposes his narcissistic preoccupation with his own declining virility and the declining image of the Great Testosterone Writer in modern society. Roth's character is, of course, Roth himself, with the usual name change. His virility has nothing to do with love, intimacy, tenderness, or procreation. It has to do with conquering---in this book a beautiful, intelligent, capable, highly educated and talented woman who could be his granddaughter. How insufferably boring.
Roth pretends to care about Social Issues, giving us tedious liberal clichés about the current national political scene, but he admits that he really doesn't care about anything but the state of his copulatory capacity.
Roth's preoccupation with the Great Artist takes the form of the book's protagonist attempting to stop a young literary critic from revealing the sordid past of a deceased Great Writer. We know the Great Writer is a Great Man whose writings are simply an externalization of his Great Soul and his Unquenchable Artistic Spirit, because the young woman who lived with him when he died spent the next forty years Cherishing His Memory, rather than living a life of her own. From the afterlife, this Great Writer offers us a manifesto holding that the lowly hoi polloi that comprise the reading public should uncritically revere the Great Writer, and abandon the quest to interpret, criticize, analyze, or personalize this Nietzschian superman.
Perhaps my problem with this book is that I read a novel to learn what the author has discovered about life and the Universe, and I really don't care about his or her personal life, unless this has been in some sense an exceptional life. The only thing exceptional about Roth is his literary success.
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