A Tale of Tough Cookies

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE GHOST WRITER by Philip Roth Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 180pages; $8.95

According to the cabbies of American fiction, Philip Roth has a great glove but can't hit the long ball. The fans will always yearn for the big shot that resounds with bulging affirmations and conventional wisdom. Roth even parodied this expectation in The Great American Novel (1973), a 400-page indulgence of his gifts for lampoon and mimicry.

That display now seems to have been a form of primal yuk therapy at the onset of middle age. Roth was 40 at the time. His reputation as a master of literary comedy had been firmly established by Portnoy's Complaint. My Life as a Man (1974) and The Professor of Desire (1977) returned to the sensitive roots of his wit: the conflicts between lust and respectability, art and burlesque, cultural ties and personal freedom, the problem of how to be--or not to be--a Jew. Civilization and its discontents were no longer a set of Freudian trampolines for a spry intelligence; the escape from solemnity required a more studied effort. Oddly, Roth's most exciting work of the '70s remains relatively unknown: two long stories first published in American Review. In On the Air, a talent agent named Lippman attempts to book Albert Einstein as radio's first Jewish Answer Man, only to find that the road to Princeton is a gauntlet of murderous anti-Semites. Looking at Kafka began as a critical essay and gracefully unfurled into a fantasy in which Kafka did not die in 1924 but emigrated to New Jersey where he became Roth's Hebrew school teacher and troubled suitor of his maiden aunt.

The Ghost Writer promises the incredible with the suggestion that Anne Frank is alive and working at Harvard's library. But Roth steps back from the inviting brink of fantasy. He retreats, in fact, to the drab reality of the 1950s, the time of his own spectacular debut as the author of Goodbye, Columbus. The new book retains the look, if not the actual furniture, of autobiography. Goodbye, Columbus is called Higher Education; its author is Nathan Zuckerman who, like Roth, was raised in a middle-class Jewish section of Newark. His story is based on a family embarrassment, a tale of money, lawsuits and maternal sacrifice that upsets his parents and the pillars of their community. "Can you honestly say that there is anything in your short story that would not warm the heart of a Julius Streicher or a Joseph Goebbels?" asks the disappointed judge who had once written a glowing recommendation for Nathan's college entrance application.

What the tribe finds offensive, the literary priesthood hails as original. Zuckerman is granted an audience at the Berkshire retreat of E.I. Lonoff, a celebrated carpenter of ironic Jewish stories. To the young writer, art replaces traditions, Lonoff supersedes all spiritual advisers as the chief rabbi of aesthetic purity, and the visit itself becomes a kind of bar mitzvah at which Zuckerman is accepted as a man and a writer.

Unfortunately, he is not the sole seeker of Lonoff's attention. Lonoff's wife Hope, frantic after years of keeping a quiet house for the artist, complains that she has to catch the toast before it pops. On her husband's preoccupation with work: "I got fondled more by strangers on the rush-hour subway during two months in 1935 than I have up here in the last twenty years."

Nathan's other competitor is Amy Bellette, a young researcher sent by Harvard to compile Lonoff's papers. She wants to take him to Italy for a life of truth and beauty. Nathan would like to go himself, because he is perversely excited by Amy's resemblance to Anne Frank. He imagines a lengthy scenario in which Anne survives Hitler's extermination camps to become Miss Bellette, who reasons that if she were known to be alive, her Diary would be read merely as a teen-age adventure story.

The real Amy curtly evades Nathan's questions about her background. She is a smart and very tough cookie. As is Lonoff; as is Zuckerman; as is Roth himself. The Ghost Writer is a bruising book. Within its artfully tangled plot, Roth tells off his critics and debunks romantic notions of the writing life. Henry James' "passion of doubt" and "madness of art" become a medieval incubus and fanatic patience; Lonoff, more the ascetic Old World Jew than his Yankee trappings might indicate, spends all his time pushing sentences around and worrying about them. His comment on writing 27 drafts of a single story: "To get it wrong so many times."

Roth gets it just right: the cadences and diction of the provincial and the pretentious, the fresh edge of Nathan's ambition, his helpless rage and the confusion of his victims. Zuckerman will do anything for a good line. He imagines going home with news for his mother. "I met a marvelous young woman while I was up in New England. I love her and she loves me. We are going to be married." "Married? But so fast? Nathan, is she Jewish?" "Yes, she is." "But who is she?" "Anne Frank."

The gag comes dangerously close to unimaginable Holocaust humor. It is funny and embarrassing at the same time, a God-forbidden break in decorum that allows the anarchic spirit out for a breath of air. Roth has always excelled at this, and if the reader is offended, The Ghost Writer strongly suggests that it is not the author's problem.--R.Z. Sheppard

Excerpt

"Soundlessly as I could, I slipped down from the desk and made my way on my toes to the daybed . . . My astonishment at what I'd overheard, my shame at the unpardonable breach of his trust, my relief at having escaped undiscovered--all that turned out to be nothing, really, beside the frustration I soon began to feel over the thinness of my imagination and what that promised for the future. Dad-da, Florence, the great Durante; her babyishness and desire, his mad, heroic restraint--Oh, if only I could have imagined the scene I'd overheard! If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life! If one day I could just approach the originality and excitement of what actually goes on! But if I did, what then would they think of me, my father and his judge? How would me elders hold up against that? And if they couldn't . . . how well would I hold up against being hated and reviled and disowned?"

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