This is a book about the act (struggle) of writing fiction, about the way our upbringing and influences shape us, and primarily about death: of an America (the one of FDR and his 20th Century moment, dragged through the disillusion of Nixon, Reagan and Bush pere et fils); or of oneself: in old age, seeing our identity dissolving and trying (in vain) to hedge our bets against it. In its brief dramatic interludes, it is also largely about how we "set the scene" of how we would like to be remembered - through writing, establishing a narrative self that will remain the dominant voice of our selves well into the future. It is also a meditation on an America (like Zuckerman) that has gone from an impetuous, confident child, grand with its ideas, into a creature grown (seemingly prematurely) old, growling into irrelevance, impotence and intolerance. The struggle over authority: the narrative we create through our fictions, mythologies and legends and the criss-crossing events that lie apart from and underneath that narrative.

These are things you can always expect to encounter in a Roth book. He is quite simply one of the greatest living American authors on death, on the process of writing, on the disconnect between fiction and "real life." So this should be great - a slim tombstone at the head of his work, like an epigram framing his fiction, his American century, and his legacy.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get over the impression that it was "minor" Roth. It seems (strangely) insignificant, unfinished, struggled over and then dashed off with half a heart. His description of Faulkner's tactic when facing irrelevance - "doggedly submit the completed manuscript for publication, permitting the book that he'd labored over unstintingly, and that he could take no further, to reach the public as it was and to yield whatever satisfactions it could" - seems very apt here. I love some later Faulkner - so that's not a huge insult. But it doesn't make Exit Ghost anywhere near Roth's best work. It fits in fairly well as a minor coda to the entire Zuckerman saga, but on its own, it floats unmoored off in the wings.