By Philip Roth
Vintage, $24 | Reviewed by David Levinson

REPORTEDLY the source for 1999’s your friends and neighbours rip, shit and bust-fest, Deconstructing Harry, Philip Roth’s Ghost Writer – surprise, surprise – hoists the yarmulka on post-WW2 Jewish artistic consciousness to provide a menacingly unbuttoned account of what makes it fly – namely an untuneful hashing of burdened uncertainty and greasy, rebellious self-entitlement. The protagonist (and literary alter-ego), is Nate Zuckerman, a young Jewish writer old enough to trade his own myth for pussy, but not yet old enough to stop believing in the myths of others. Dabbling in creative alchemy, Nate spins buried family turmoil into literary gold dust; but rather than the anticipated open arms and blood-wrought approval, it leads only to a splintering of personal relationships and the arrival at an ethical fork-in-the-road: to sell out, or not to sell out?

As boroughbred-cocksure as that question may seem, in Roth’s world – where past and present, fact, fiction and metafiction find themselves compressed into a single, frozen day in suburban New Jersey – it plummets nosefirst into a veritable crisis of identity; with the not-so-faint memory of the Holocaust still lingering over his head, Nate’s transgression quickly inflates from familial to communal to a crime committed against the entire Jewish race. And while Roth/Zuckerman’s sometimes-satiric tone may revel in that kind of clownish pride – even trumping it by hollering out to fellow naysays Joyce and Flaubert –, its undertow continues to chug with a wolfish sense of guilt and displacement. In the end, Nate is left with the decision to either create art kindled by the ‘spirit of community,’ and risk an historical filter whereby the 20th century Jew is in effect never leaves the concentration camp; or, make the break, and face the possibility of a lifetime spent mulling over Passover invitations ‘lost in the mail’.

Clawing for autonomy, he turns to E.M. Lonoff, a secluded writer whom he came to lionise as an undergrad. For Nate, having escaped the glittering foxhounds of New York’s literati, domestic penance rakes the imagination with wartime delirium. But for Lonoff, it’s a permanent sentence, carried out with all the crushing reassurance of an OCD ritual (on the topic of writing, he describes himself as doing nothing more than “turning sentences around”). The grand irony is that, given everything Nate does to “sell” Lonoff, he only ends up charting his erosion into a cruel balance of fasco-fastidiousness and vocational unfeeling; even as that torturous adherence to not-being is revealed to frame Lonoff’s relationship with his wife, Nate remains utterly oblivious – not by way of denial, but because his own suppression of a clotted misogyny seems to have eviscerated it from his field of vision.

Probably as equally dangerous as Lonoff’s penchant for sawdust-and-tinsel utilitarianism, is the way Nate weaves everything around him into fanciful bullshit. Invited by the couple to spend the night, he ends up jerking off on the study bed, before building a Babel of books so as to better enable him to decipher the whispers escaping through from the room above. Turns out that the hot young prior-student living with Lonoff and his wife is actually his mistress, Amy Bellette, though here, at the moment where Lonoff finds himself at his most goldenly calf-like, Nate is too busy photoshopping Amy’s story onto Anne Frank’s to really care; in fact, he’s giddier over the prospect of Anne Frank as the ultimate take-home-to-momma girl. Piling exquisite corpse onto exquisite corpse, he ends up with an entire suburban saga about the difficulties of molding to the sodashop lifestyle, especially after being made poster-girl for the 20th century’s most horrific and well-documented tragedy. More than the result of fingerpainting with metafiction, however, this almost profane late-night sublimation is marked by a gaping unease, the terror of personal identity lost and replaced by historical narrative – the more he relents in its fabrication, the more Amy, like each of the other characters, threatens to become the mere shadow of a flickering holy light.