Volume 53, Number 10 · June 8, 2006
The Way Out
By Daniel Mendelsohn
Everyman
by Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin, 182 pp. $24.00
At the beginning of Philip Roth's 1979 novella The Ghost Writer, the twenty-three-year-old narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, tremulously approaches the secluded New England home of a famous but reclusive Jewish writer, E.I. Lonoff. Of this Lonoff we are told that he has long ago forsaken his urban, immigrant roots—the cultural soil from which, we are meant to understand, his vaguely Bashevis Singeresque fiction sprang—for 'a clapboard farmhouse...at the end of an unpaved road twelve hundred feet up in the Berkshires.' Long out of circulation, he is considered comical by New York literary people for having 'lived all these years 'in the country'—that is to say, in the goyish wilderness of birds and trees where America began and long ago had ended.' Still, young Nathan, an aspiring novelist, admires Lonoff extravagantly, not only because of 'the tenacity that had kept him writing his own kind of stories all that time,' but because
Review, 3743 words
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