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 Zuckerman, his real father, a pitiable figure who tries to keep Nathan from publishing a story about the Zuckerman family; young Amy and the middle-aged Hope Lonoff, rivals the whole way through). But best of all there are the subtle balances that make fiction into art. Roth balances the weather outside the house with the storm inside. While snow pelts against the eaves, setting an eerie mood, one sees Roth in complete...