Interpretative fantasies, from Clarissa and Tristram Shandy to Finnegans Wake, Pale Fire, and Gravity's Rainbow, have traditionally concerned themselves with such problems as "validity," "discursivity," and "reality" vs. "textuality," particularly with the status of fictional texts, their origins, ends, and authoritative power. Philip Roth's recent novel, The Ghost Writer, is part of this tradition: it is about origins, and the problems o...

The Ghost Writer must be initially examined from the context of the Bildungsroman because Roth has so deliberately placed it in this context. After focusing on the novel as a work of fiction within a clearly defined tradition, then the critic can look to the narrative for parallels to the author's life and insights into his growth and development. In comparing the novel with its predecessors we can not only evaluate its departures from that tradition but also assess Roth's implications about t...

Sixty years after Joyce published his [bildungsroman known as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man], its themes sound hackneyed: a youth caught between his vision of the truth and the sentimental, institutionalized beliefs of his elders; the artist escaping from the world of his father through flights of fancy that become fact. To redeem this adolescent fantasy from the storehouse of cultural commonplaces, a writer has just two choices. The serious approach already canonized, Philip Roth applied his comi...

On the evidence of his latest novel, The Ghost Writer,… Philip Roth continues to be a promising writer. Roth's first book, Goodbye, Columbus, comprised a collection of stories and a novella. They were written in a voice that was mordantly funny, yet inflected with a quality of seriousness. It was uniquely suited to the lightly-borne anguish of Roth's fictional situations and capable of sustaining interest in the fairly specialized conflicts of which it spoke.

At the age of forty-six, Philip Roth has relented. He has written a short and touching novel, The Ghost Writer, which is remarkably free of the zeal for settling scores that soured so much of his work. In place of the animosity he lavished on nouveau-riche vulgarians in Goodbye, Columbus, on repressive Jewish mothers in Portnoy's Complaint, and destructive Gentile wives in My Life As a Man, Roth has drawn the characters in The Ghost Writer with delicacy, compassion, and a tender respect for their hon...

Who is the ghost writer in Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer? In this nouvelle of guilt about anti-Semitism, the ghost seems to be that of Anne Frank. Roth speaks of her as a "Jewish ghost," and writes of Anne's "seething passion to come back as an avenging ghost!" But Amy Bellette's delusion that she is Anne Frank rediviva cannot sustain the imaginative load the ghost writer carries. It is the madness of art, not the madness of Amy, that is required, so the gho...

What if there had been a Jewish version of Henry James? In this marvellously controlled ironic novella [The Ghost Writer], Philip Roth has invented a bristlingly vivid Jewish James called E. I. Lonoff, a selfless patriarch of 'sympathy and pitilessness'. Then he unleashes a disciple on Lonoff, a young Jewish and rather Rothian writer who is comically eager to learn the lesson of the master. After a day of observing the 'terminal restraint' that passes for life in the Lonoff dacha...

Lonoff, brilliant writer and austere recluse, is the object of a literary pilgrimage by Nathan Zuckerman, the central character of [The Ghost Writer]. Zuckerman is a writer too: 23 years old, four stories in print, and on the make in both senses of that phrase. (p. 1) As an original for Zuckerman, we are likely indeed to think of Roth himself near the start of his career. The central issue of this novel has as its seed an unpublished story of Zuckerman's that upsets his parents extremely: a treatment...

The Ghost Writer transcends the label "ghost story" in its balanced artistry and its dead certainty of language. While Lonoff and Nathan Zuckerman discuss a mutual writer-acquaintance, Abravanel …, one sees Lonoff to be a simple man who shuns any form of success or social life. There is everywhere the balance between Lonoff's genius and his pathetic domesticity…. There is also the primal balance of young and old (Nathan and Lonoff, his literary father; Nathan and Doc Zucke...

I had only to read [the] two opening sentences of "The Ghost Writer" to realize—with a long sigh of anticipated pleasure—that I was once again in the hands of a superbly endowed storyteller. That echo of the beginnings of a dozen great Russian tales … reassured me that Philip Roth is still exhibiting the good form that he recovered after "The Breast" and a couple of other aberrations. Whatever one may feel about the limitations of his vision and humanity as a...

Philip Roth's talent feeds off shame. Shame at bad faith, others' suffering, sexual failure (still worse, success); the shame of literature, and the distance between language and feeling; and shame at his own shell-less narcissism. The Ghost Writer is mainly about this last kind, but since literary ambition for Roth subsumes the question of his relation to the Jewish past, and his doomed craving for a warm, live muse, it takes in the others as well. And it does so with bland economy, both of s...

Since Mr. Roth's previous novels have contained a number of characters as solidly convincing as a fire engine, it is a surprise and something of a disappointment to find [The Ghost Writer] populated by bloodless intellectual conceptions. It is as though he had written an essay (and it would have been a very clever, penetrating essay) on "Possible Attitudes of the American-Jewish Author" and had then turned his argument into fiction by constructing a character to fit each attitude. It is...