Exit Ghost

Zusatztext “[Roth's] prose is as assured and inviting as ever. . . . Exit Ghost delivers pages of great! sad power.”— The Washington Post Book World “This book is latter-day Roth at his intricately thoughtful best.”— The New York Times Book Review “Even in the face of death these characters are vivid and alive. . . . Roth is without a doubt one of the greatest living American writers! if not the greatest.”— The San Francisco Chronicle “Intricate! artful! and pressing.”— The New Yorker Informationen zum Autor Philip Roth Klappentext Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York in the long-awaited final installment of Philip Roth's renowned Zuckerman series. Alone for eleven years on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age. Walking the streets of New York after so many years away, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be again, with love, mourning, desire, and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities. Revisiting the characters from Roth's much-heralded The Ghost Writer , Exit Ghost is an astounding leap into yet another phase in this great writer's oeuvre. Leseprobe 1 The Present Moment I hadn't been in New York in eleven years. Other than for surgery in Boston to remove a cancerous prostate, I'd hardly been off my rural mountain road in the Berkshires in those eleven years and, what's more, had rarely looked at a newspaper or listened to the news since 9/11, three years back; with no sense of loss-merely, at the outset, a kind of drought within me-I had ceased to inhabit not just the great world but the present moment. The impulse to be in it and of it I had long since killed. But now I'd driven the hundred and thirty miles south to Manhattan to see a urologist at Mount Sinai Hospitalwho specialized in performing a procedure to help the thousands of men like me left incontinent by prostate surgery. By going in through a catheter inserted in the urethra to inject a gelatinous form of collagen where the neck of the bladder meets the urethra, he was getting significant improvement in about fifty percent of his patients. These weren't great odds, especially as “significant improvement” meant only a partial alleviation of the symptoms- reducing “severe incontinence” to “moderate incontinence” or “moderate” to “light.” Still, because his results were better than those that other urologists had achieved using roughly the same technique (there was nothing to be done about the other hazard of radical prostatectomy that I, like tens of thousands of others, had not been lucky enough to escape-nerve damage resulting in impotence), I went to New York for a consultation, long after I imagined myself as having adapted to the practical inconveniences of the condition. In the years since the surgery, I even thought I'd surmounted the shaming side of wetting oneself, overcome the disorienting shock that had been particularly trying in the first year and a half, during the months when the surgeon had given me reason to think that the incontinence would gradually disappear over time, as it does in a small number of fortunate patients. But despite the dailiness of the routine necessary to keep myself clean and odor-free, I must never truly have become accustomed to wearing the special undergarments and changing the pads and dealing with the “accidents,” any more than I had mastered the underlying humiliation, because there I was, at the age of seventy-one, back on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, not many blocks from where I'd once lived as a vigorous, healthy younger man-there I was in the reception area of the urology department o...

Product details

• Authors: Philip Roth
• Publisher: Vintage USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 11.11.2008
• EAN: 9780307387295
• ISBN: 978-0-307-38729-5
• No. of pages: 292
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 216 mm x 25 mm
• Series: Vintage International; Vintage International
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature