Just received my copy of Philip Roth’s latest novel, Exit Ghost. Here is the review from the Times. (sorry I’m so late on this one, life is a bit slower across the pond.) I haven’t read any of the reviews — Roth is one of the few authors whose books I buy once they come out.
I’d been alone these past eleven years in a small house on a dirt road in the deep country, having decided to live apart like that some two years before the cancer was diagnosed. I see few people. Since the death, a year earlier, of my neighbor and friend Larry Hollis, two, three days can go by when I speak to no one but the housekeeper who comes to clean each week and her husband, who is my caretaker. I don’t go to dinner parties, I don’t go to movies, I don’t watch television, I don’t own a cell phone or a VCR or a DVD player or a computer. I continue to live in the Age of the Typewriter and have no idea what the World Wide Web is. I no longer bother to vote. I write for most of the day and often into the night. I read, mainly the books that I first discovered as a student, the masterpieces of fiction whose power over me is no less, and in some cases greater, than it was in my initial exciting encounters with them. Lately I’ve been rereading Joseph Conrad for the first time in fifty years, most recently The Shadow Line, which I’d brought with me to New York to look through yet again, having read it all in one go only the other night. I listen to music, I hike in the woods, when it’s warm I swim in my pond, whose temperature, even in the summer, never gets much above seventy degrees.
Also, for those of you who would like to take up the Zuckerman trilogy from the beginning, the Library of America has published the first four novels (out of how many? five, with Everyman? Six now with Exit Ghost?) in the latest volume of his collected works.
Tags: roth review
