Volume 54, Number 19 · December 6, 2007
Nathan, Farewell
By Sarah Kerr
Exit Ghost
by Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin, 292 pp., $26.00
So the Zuckerman saga has ended, with no soaring chords of elegy and not a single consoling hint that though our hero looks set to fade away, his legacy will carry on. It's no surprise that Philip Roth would take such care not to be sentimental, at least not in the usual ways. Yet it was impossible beforehand to imagine how he would handle the finale. That it was so is a credit to the freedom, sometimes out of old habit called outrageous or brash but in practice often shrewd and elusive, that Roth has insisted on over five decades of writing fiction, and nearly three decades of writing Zuckerman.
Review, 4418 words
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