Like many writers, Philip Roth relies heavily on his own experiences. With Roth it is much more transparent than most. He often uses the same alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, in his books. Nathan, like Roth once was, is a Jewish kid from working class Newark, New Jersey with lots of aspirations. He, like Roth, attends The University of Chicago. Nathan is front and center here and the most likely candidate to become someone's ghostwriter. Nathan here is obsessed with a successful, senior, writer who is a recluse in rural New England, also Jewish. E.I. Lonoff reads like a cross between J.D. Salinger and a mature Philip Roth. Becoming a ghost writer for Lonoff seems a no brainer. But Roth is much too good a writer to take the easy route.

There are at least two other ways to think of someone being a ghost writer. One would be a writer who is dead and is now a ghost. Another is a writer who writes about ghosts. Fascinating. Who would have gone in either of those directions. Who else but Roth. Roth never even mentions the normal meaning of ghost writer. He leaves that to the readers imagination. Ghost writing would be perfect for Nathan. He's still young and not yet widely recognized. And Lonoff's name alone sells books. And Lonoff struggles to get things down in final form. Lonoff loves to take a sentence and rework it over and over. Great final results but an excruciating process for both him and those around him, especially his long suffering wife with the wonderful name, Hope. Is it too much to think that Roth is actually telling us this is how he writes, and rewrites, and rewrites. Looking at the sentences in Roth's books it's easy to see other ways those same thoughts could have been expressed.

Nathan is deep in the process of gaining Lonoff's attention and enjoying how Lonoff appears to be doing exactly what Nathan had hoped for. And then she appears. Not Lonoff's wife who seems to barely tolerate him. But a young woman who has already won over Lonoff. She's a former student who is working at Harvard as a college librarian, and trying to collect every draft that Lonoff ever abandoned. She's a curator but also so much more. She seems to have a slight accent and since this is post World War II Nathan imagines she is a refugee from that conflict. She already has a place in the Lonoff household. She's not Lonoff's daughter but likely the same age as Lonoff's children who are long gone. Her name is Amy Bellette. It's easy to see her as Lonoff's mistress but we never know that for certain.

The story really gets interesting when Nathan spents a sleepless night, in Lonoff's house. Amy is also staying over with them and this is where Nathan's imagination really gets into high gear. He tries to unravel the mystery of Amy. He can't make up his mind between two possible back stories, both of which sees her as less than stable, mentally. In one scenario she's a writer totally obsessed with Anne Frank. Her likely European background fits as she might be one of those children who were separated from their families in a desperate attempt to escape the Nazis. The second possibility is that she's actually Anne Frank who miraculously survived the concentration camps and wrestles with how to unite with her father and not destroy the myth he and the world have created. Nathan decides he's in love with Amy. He wants to marry her so he can finally stop his family's criticism of his stories as antisemitic. How could they attack the husband of a Jewish saint?

To see how this resolves you'll have to read for yourself. It's a short book. I highly recommend i ( )

„Egy decemberi délután, a naplementét megelőző utolsó órában történt, több mint húsz esztendővel ezelőtt – huszonhárom éves voltam, első novelláimat írtam és publikáltam akkoriban, és mint előttem már nem egy fejlődésregény hősét, a saját vaskos fejlődésregényem gondolata foglalkoztatott –, ekkor történt tehát, hogy megérkeztem a nagy ember tanyájára, látogatóba.” Nos, ez pont egy olyan első mondat, amiért egyes írók akár ölni is képesek.

Roth kisregénye a Zuckerman-univerzum fénypontja: tömör, mégis sokrétű, kerek egész, mégis nyitott szöveg. Az ifjú Zuckerman megérkezik példaképéhez, Lonoff-hoz, a nagy íróhoz, azzal a szent céllal, hogy tanítványául szegődjön. Csakhogy az írók nem Yodák – nem igazán illenek be ebbe a mester-padavan viszonyrendszerbe. Például nem annyira érdeklik őket a tanítványok (pláne a hímneműek), sokkal inkább saját problémáik (köztük a nőnemű tanítványok), amelyeket megpróbálnak művészetté absztrahálni. De ne higgyük, hogy a reménybeli tanítványok jobbak lennének: valójában ők se mestert keresnek, hanem élményt – olyan eseményeket, amelyek jól mutatnak saját fejlődésregényükben. Igazi kis paraziták, még ha nem is tudnak róla – csak azért törleszkednek, hátha lepottyan a Nagy Író asztaláról egy morzsa, amin saját múzsájuk dagadtra hízhat. Roth tökéletes kis kamaradrámája szűk 24 órába sűrítve tálalja a nagy kérdéseket az írók feladatáról, az alkotás születéséről, emberi kapcsolatokról és zsidóságról – a roth-i önirónia talán legsziporkázóbb megnyilvánulása.

(Második olvasás, a nagy Zuckerman-könyvben már találkoztam vele vagy tíz éve, de kezembe hullott tegnap, és kellőképpen rövid és kellőképpen jó ahhoz, hogy most újraolvassam.) ( )

Sublime. ( )

Has a Daughter of Time feel to it, challenging perceived wisdom on a historical character, the character this time being Anne Frank. ( )

This is the fourth novel by Philip Roth I've read. I enjoyed, for the most part, though I did think it wasn't long enough. I would have given it five stars, except that the plot twist I thought was coming didn't happen. If it had happen, I would have gladly given it five starts.
I have the feeling I will have to read it again to understand it. ( )

I don't have anything particularity negative to say about this book. However, I found it a bit hard to get through. I didn't really care for the characters and there's not much of a plot. There are some interesting thoughts on the Jewish experience which I enjoyed pondering and it's about writers which is always interesting to me. ( )

Concept was great. Writing was great. Ending? Not so much. (Apologies for not having read it sooner! Came out in 1979.) ( )

Loved meeting Zuckerman. Wonder how much a trip to Connecticut to meet Philip Roth would feel like a visit to E.I. Lonoff. Pet theory: this book is an extended rewrite of Bob Dylan's great "Went to See The Gypsy." Thoughts? ( )

Roth seems obsessed with being Jewish and even makes his own obsession an obsession. This is early Roth in all his autobiographical glory. One of his characters thinks she's Anne Frank (or is it that she really is?). Lacks the uproarious fun of _Portnoy's Complaint_, but retains wry humor. ( )

Roth's Lesson of the Master. Nathan Zuckerman spends the night in the home of his literary idol E. I. Lonoff, and the Ethan Fromesque Lonoff menage becomes a screen on which Z. projects his own anxieties about art as betrayal and renunciation. One of Roth's better novels. ( )

I love Roth, and the Zuckerman Bound series this novel opens in particular. In 1956, young author Nathan Zuckerman goes to meet his hero EI Lonoff, after falling out with his parents about a story he wrote depicting his Jewish family arguing over an inheritance. Amongst other things, he finds a student living with Lonoff who looks like Anne Frank grown older, could even be her...

Not as manic or outlandishly funny as some of the later episodes, but it's all bubbling under the surface here. Smart and extremely readable, and remarkably sympathetic to all characters involved without being worthy, when the topics under discussion could have made for a terribly dry and sentimental, or even arrogant novel in the hands of someone else. Fantastic, even better than I remembered. ( )

Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a 23-year-old writer who has published a few well-received short stories. He sends an adulatory letter to literary lion E.I. Lonoff, and is invited to visit the author and his wife at their secluded estate. Lonoff writes stories featuring Jews, and is methodically dedicated to his craft. “I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again. Then I have lunch.” He is surprisingly humble about his craft and his life, believing (it appears, justifiably) that he does little other than write. In fact, if his wife wants to have him do anything else, he resists. "I'm haunted by the loss of all that good time. " He is intrigued by Zuckerman's door-to-door experiences in his young life, and believes, based on his short stories, that Zuckerman has a strong voice and will be a formidable author.

Zuckerman, just starting out and unsure of himself, treasures and endlessly revisits every word of praise. They spend the afternoon discussing other Jewish writers, and literature and art. It becomes apparent that Lonoff's wife is frustrated by their life, and is threatened by a young woman writer who is staying with them. Zuckerman, in turn, is enchanted by the young woman, Amy Bellette. She has a bizarre twist in her background, and creates a triangle, and quadrangle, of tension that only Lonoff, with his writing as his lodestar, navigates with equanimity. I found the bizarre twist somewhat off-putting, taking me out of the story I was wrapped up in. But others might react differently. It has a connection to one of Zuckerman's in-process stories we learn about, which he has based on actual events in his family. His family (after he shows the story to his father) has denounced it as anti-Jewish and as confirming stereotypes about Jews. A family acquaintance sends him a sadly funny questionnaire intended to help him realize how awful to Jews the story is. Should he publish it or not is one of the thought-provoking questions raised in this spare novel.

Having put himself on a high wire in writing about writers, Roth's own writing is clean and at times breath-taking. "There was still more wind than snow, but in Lonoff’s orchard the light had all but seeped away, and the sound of what was on its way was menacing. Two dozen wild old apple trees stood as first barrier between the bleak unpaved road and the farmhouse. Next came a thick green growth of rhododendron, then a wide stone wall fallen in like a worn molar at the center, then some fifty feet of snow-crusted lawn, and finally, drawn up close to the house and protectively overhanging the shingles, three maples that looked from their size to be as old as New England. In back, the house gave way to unprotected fields, drifted over since the first December blizzards. From there the wooded hills began their impressive rise, undulating forest swells that just kept climbing into the next state." I'm glad I read this very short novel for the American Author Challenge, and it might be a good entry read for those who haven't read this author but are curious. Four stars. ( )

Such a pleasure reading Roth's fluid prose -- so fluid and assured that it could begin to dull your critical attention. It's like you could forget you were there. Yet the ideas he tends to have an audacity that keep you from being too comfortably lulled. By contrast, other authors seem to tread with such great care -- advancing cautiously sentence by sentence, not wanting to disturb what's come before. Roth makes aggressive moves but with no trace of recklessness, as if through some kind of perfect balance of effort and intuition. ( )

Yeah, um... don't see the genius in this one. I'm mainly reading it so I can read Z Unbound, which everyone says is fantastic. Right now I'm not exactly hopping with enthusiasm though- this is an okay long short story with a torturous, unsubtle and unnecessary third chapter added in. I guess if you're really into the psychology of the author and so on you'll get a lot out of it? If you're interested in literature which isn't about literature... go with the hilarious Portnoy's Complaint instead. ( )

absolutely incredible in every way. ( )

This is a minor work: not so much a novel as a series of three linked novellas (plus a short coda). The third of the novellas -- in which the tyro novelist Nathan Zuckerman convinces himself that a young woman for whom he's developed the hots is in fact a survived Anne Frank, or perhaps just someone who believes so much that she's Anne Frank as to make herself so -- is by far the most impressive of the three. The book struck a definite chord with me since I've recently been working painfully slowly on a novella about ghostwriters.
( )

It took me a bit to get into this book. I didn't think I'd like it at first and couldn't find the point of the whole thing. As I read, Roth wove his magic as he always does and I ended the book with extreme satisfaction. ( )

It was very strange to read this in Amsterdam, having picked it up in a used bookstore in the U.S. and having no notion of its contents. Roth begins with the themes that manhood begins with attending to consequences, and recognizing the fallibility of one's idols. It then veers engagingly and precipitously into Zuckerman's long fantasy about Anne Frank, raising questions such as what the Holocaust means for the generation of Jews that followed? Can you be free of history, or of fetishizing it? Though a short novel, I found it provocative and compelling. ( )

I just finished reading The Ghost Writer by Phillip Roth. Nathan Zuckerman was a 23 year old up-and-coming writer with four stories published and an author profile in the Saturday Review. He has already ruined his relationship with his family by his autobiographical work, and his relationship with his girlfriend is on the rocks because of adultery and honesty.

Visiting his reclusive idol in the Berkshires, Nathan has a chance to evaluate his life and work and finds himself turning his problems into metafiction. I found this book funny in parts and very well-written. I give it a B+! ( )

Discovering the contradictory and strange .Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue, 1979-1985 , Author Roth Philip protagonist Nathan Zuckerman,tensions between literature and life,novels chronicling adventures,subsequent developments Zuckerman extended fictional work in prose that we showing profound knowledge that Nathan also used metaphorically on to gain with effort book recommended, like something that everyone can relate introduction and brief analysis into proper writing. The Ghost Writer was first published in two parts in The New Yorker in 1979,there was any good fiction about is the first novel by Philip Roth to be narrated by Nathan Zuckerman,is a fictional character that appears in the role of narrator and protagonist, of a writer that idolizes. ( )

I've read enough Roth now that it's difficult for me to assess how much someone who's not familiar with him would enjoy certain books of his, this definitely being of those.

The premise was interesting to me, as a Roth fan, because it was clear that both main characters were based on different versions of him. One, Nathan Zuckerman, was a young writer from Chicago whose begun to get some recognition. He goes to visit his literary idol, E.I. Lonoff, who was supposedly based off of Barnard Malamud (author of The Fixer) but reading it with my knowledge of Roth, Lonoff has a million similarities to the way that Roth lives and writes now.

There was also an interesting sub-plot, where a young woman became convinced that she was Anne Frank and that she had actually escaped her attic.

I loved this book a million times over and wanted to start reading it again as soon as I'd finished it. ( )

Where we can find an example of post modern inter-textual strategies as a common device used in the reviews found in the World Lit Blog, Traces is in the review of the Philip Roth/Nathan Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer. The reviewer (in his embedded textual self) explores the understanding of digital identity through impersonation of a reviewer for Traces, a Journal of windsweptfiction:

Ghost Written….

The problem I have with Philip Roth, the next writer on our pre-2009 Nobel review agenda is which of the 15 or so critically acclaimed books of his to review? He has won 20+ literary awards and 11 of his novels have won specific awards.

The Ghost Writer was suggested to me as the next novel to read after his gem of a first novella, Goodbye Columbus. TGW is the first novel of the Zuckerman Bound Collection - which also includes Zuckerman Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson and The Prague Orgy - sharing the alter ego Jewish American writer, Nathan Zuckerman as the narrator.

Viscera
In the first of the novel’s four sections, entitled Maestro, Nathan Zuckerman narrates his own Portrait of the Artist as a Young man as he reflects back 20 some years in time to the opening setting when as a new literary light he meets his saint, EL Lonoff, after receiving an invitation to the reclusive old writer’s Berkshire farmhouse. The model for Lonoff is reportedly Bernard Malamud, whom Roth met on several occasions and was an avowed admirer of. The master and (hopeful) apprentice carefully sound each other out, one with not much at stake other than a wasted evening, the other with his whole life’s calling hanging on every word. The exchange between the two is Jamesian. Significantly a topic the two discuss is the James short story ‘The Middle Years’ which reflects a similar artist relation to his work dynamic as our narrative. We witness three ‘portraits of the artist’ being painted simultaneously: Lonoff’s by Zuckerman’s imagined-Lonoff’s as well as his own. Lonoff emerges as being a Father figure for the narrator. Roth, painting with all three hands, works in two additional intertwined stories: Zuckerman’s recently strained relation with his own father, and the appearance of Lonoff’s young secretary Amy, who of course, is also a young writer-in-waiting.

Bones
As we navigate away from our plot summary – for one, most other book blogs take care of those duties, and two, I find it boring and three, any more details and it will destroy The Ghost Writer for you if you have not read it….

TGW themes and modal devices.
A self consciously staged Bildungsroman, the novel more specifically examines of the writer’s process of development. Besides literary influences, the ineluctable influence on an artist by his milieu. Roth’s Zuckerman does not deny his Jewish American heritage, but in comparing the older Jewish Lonoff to Zuckerman, Roth compares two counterpointed relations of the two artist’s to their work. Zuckerman’s approach to his writing is termed by Lonoff as ‘turbulent’ he is willing to use his personal as well as his families’ ethnic engendered struggles and past actual incidents in his work even if it means damaging his relationships with his family and his own heritage. The almost ascetic self-restrained Lonoff would not go there, his fiction is disengaged from the messiness of his own personal affairs.

The nature of artistic identity. (the post modern part)… Roth’s Zuckerman dramatizes his own conflict of identity as a writer– the predicament he finds himself in with his father’s and the jewish communities’ response to his short story manuscript, Higher Education- by converting it into the ‘provisional’ narrative of the novel’s third section, Femme Fatale…In the novel, two identities, fictional guises coexist, each having claims to the ‘artist’s identity’. What Zuckerman finally does in his transformation, in sheltering an identity within a second one, is what Lonoff does in reality-moving away from his subject, figuratively as well as literally. How distance between the artistic self and its work is created, the form this takes is the difference really between Modernism -Lonoff, and the post modern strategy of Zuckerman..

What I took Away
Its seems one can’t mention Roth without gushing about his prose ( gems like : “In whose sea did Andrea bob now?”) or his ability to modulate the narrative in which ever way he chooses. In looking at my array of six adjectives to summarize a novel, I could not use ‘powerful’ to describe the tension created by the novels conflicts…though there are the poignant moments, overall it is on the cerebral/literary side of the spectrum. But I would not be embarrassed to resort to beat-to-death-book-blurb: ’brilliant’.



As the above text exemplifies, the reviewer foregrounds his authorial identity as the writer of his own incoherent review, violating distinctions between blog text and reality…

Karma Chameleon (JM Coetzee) ( )

This book is wonderful! I can't recommend this fast enough. Treat yourself to this great story. The entire book is brilliant. ( )

peculiar, all over the place story. a very interesting sideline that anne frank survived. ( )

I have read the Zuckerman books that comprise American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. I've always wanted to go back and start from the beginning, which is this book. It's slim and beautiful, divided into four movements, the recounting of the necessity to break from the family in order to grown into an artist. This would be a good book club selection, lots to talk about from the artifices of fiction to the very relatable quandry of how to defy one's own sense of history and familial expectations. ( )