

Logan, whose father always voted Republican, was enraged and devastated by the results. Zuckerman, Davidoff and Logan watch the results of the 2004 presidential election together. In Exit Ghost it is revealed that Lonoff also had an incestuous affair with his sister - which led to his writer's block - and the fact that while content to teach in oblivion, he never published again.Īmerican politics forms a backdrop to the novel. The rationale for Henry Roth is that in his novels published after his death he reveals that he had an incestuous affair with his sister when he was young it also known that Henry Roth suffered from writer's block for much of his career after publishing Call It Sleep, his only major novel. It is known that Philip Roth has read the later novels of Henry Roth, though some of these remain unpublished.

Henry Roth is a major influence, as becomes clear in Exit Ghost. Zuckerman may also be motivated by his own confused feelings about Logan and Kliman.Īlthough critics once considered that Lonoff, deceased and neglected, was modelled partly on the writer Bernard Malamud, he now seems to be based on a number of writers.

Because of Kliman's zealous interest in a potentially scandalous secret from Lonoff's adolescence, neither Zuckerman nor Bellette wants to help him complete his project. Through Davidoff and Logan, Zuckerman meets Richard Kliman, a young, brash Harvard graduate who is working on a biography of Lonoff.

In his hotel room at night, Zuckerman writes a play, He and She, composed of imagined conversations between him and Logan. Zuckerman also agrees to a housing swap with a young writing couple, Billy Davidoff and Jamie Logan, and quickly becomes attracted to Logan. Lonoff's house in December, 1956, as depicted in Roth's novel The Ghost Writer. While in New York, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, whom he had last encountered during a visit to the writer E.I. presidential election, is for him to undergo a medical procedure that might cure or reduce his incontinence. The purpose of Zuckerman's journey, which he takes the week before the 2004 U.S. The plot centers on Zuckerman's return home to New York after eleven years in New England. It is the ninth, and last, novel featuring Nathan Zuckerman. Exit Ghost is a 2007 novel by Philip Roth.
