Exit Ghost

Nathan Zuckerman, now seventy-one and incontinent following prostate surgery, returns to New York City after eleven years of secluded living in the Berkshires. He seeks a medical procedure to restore bladder control but becomes entangled in the lives of a young literary couple, Jamie Logan and Billy Davidoff. Zuckerman attempts to trade his country house for their Manhattan apartment while developing an unrequited physical longing for Jamie. Simultaneously, he battles a persistent biographer, Richard Kliman, who intends to reveal a scandalous secret about Zuckerman’s late mentor, the writer E.I. Lonoff. The narrative shifts between Zuckerman’s interactions and the dialogues he scripts to imagine a different outcome with Jamie.

Readers interested in the psychological realities of aging and the decline of physical virility will find a clinical examination of late-life isolation here. The book serves those who study the tension between a writer's public reputation and their private history. A reader walks away with a blunt understanding of how cognitive memory and sexual desire persist even as the body fails. It provides a specific look at the frustration of losing one's relevance in a changing cultural landscape and the futility of trying to reclaim a discarded past.

Deep, inward-looking, contemplative and thought-provoking; a moderate read.

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