Greetings, writers—
In Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer, which I recently procured and read under the mildly embarrassing and incorrect assumption that it would have something to do with ghostwriting, the talented young writer Nathan Zuckerman—Roth’s alter ego in his Zuckerman Unbound trilogy, of which this novel is the first—visits a reclusive and venerable literary genius at his isolated New England home. This hoary old master, supposedly modeled on either Bernard Malamud or Henry Roth, is a pure “symbol of scrupulous and stern artistic commitment”; indeed, he enjoys nothing at all but writing.
Well, enjoys would be the wrong word. Obviously.
And yet he can do nothing else. Here is what he tells goggle-eyed, starstruck Zuckerman.
I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and I turn it around again. Then I have lunch. Then I come back in and write another sentence. Then I have tea and turn the new sentence around. Then I lie down on my sofa and think. Then I get up and throw them out and start from the beginning. And if I knock off from this routine for as long as a day, I’m frantic with boredom and a sense of waste….And I ask myself, why is there no way but this for me to fill my hours?
This poor writer doesn’t want to talk to his desperately lonely wife; he doesn’t want to take a walk in the lovely woods; he doesn’t even want to have sex with the beautiful assistant who flings herself at him in a late-night awkward exchange that Zuckerman physically endangers himself to overhear.
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