Roth is without a doubt one of the greatest living American writers, if not the greatest, yet, throughout his career, he has been the target of noisome and often misguided criticism. The complaints often boil down to Roth being anti-Semitic (ludicrous), misogynistic (overstated) and onanistic (what writer ultimately isn't?). In particular, criticism coming out of commentary in the '70s and '80s dismissed Roth's work as hyped, self-absorbed and not reaching the highest literary standard of being worth reading again. But I believe that most of Roth's work, and certainly "Exit Ghost," gain greater emotional depth and yield further literary richness with each subsequent reading.
Philip Roth's last book, Everyman, was a brief, bleak masterpiece about dying. It begins with the funeral of its nameless protagonist and then rapidly, unsparingly, takes us back through his life, as he loses everything that has ever mattered to him, through ageing, illness and the nearing of death.
It was a crushing statement of mortality, and some readers reacted to it with shock as it seemed to leave Roth with nowhere to go. Nowhere forward, perhaps. His new novel, Exit Ghost, his 28th book, thus goes back, into mere old age, not actual extinction. It is his ninth work of fiction employing his chief alter ego, the writer Nathan Zuckerman, who first appeared in My Life as a Man (1974) and was the centre of such novels as The Counterlife (1986), before playing a more tangential role in the likes of American Pastoral and The Human Stain.
Exist Ghost, o novo romance de Philip Roth.
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