SITUATION:
Philip Roth, 74, the pre-eminent and scarily prolific American author, has just published his 28th novel, Exit Ghost (named for a stage direction in Hamlet). Its tone is elegiac, melancholic. Appropriately set in late autumn, during the George W. Bush/John Kerry U.S. presidential election, it's full of last times - last glimpses, last feud, last love, all blowing away like dried leaves. It is also, Roth insists, his last book that will feature his recurring protagonist Nathan Zuckerman, who is also a novelist, and who has brought Roth some of his greatest stories, from 1979's The Ghost Writer (note the symmetry of the titles), through the towering trilogy of I Married a Communist, American Pastoral and The Human Stain.
In Exit Ghost, Zuckerman, 71, has emerged from the rural mountain retreat where he's been writing in seclusion for over a decade and returned to New York for an experimental medical procedure he has no faith will work. (He survived prostate cancer, but suffers from incontinence, which the procedure may fix, and impotence, which is incurable.) The city, under its incessant cellphone chatter, feels haunted to him. And then he meets a woman who makes him feel even worse: Jamie Logan, mid-30s, beautiful, in publishing (everyone in the book is in publishing in some way) and wife to an uxorious writer. Despite himself, Zuckerman "yielded immediately to the ruthlessness of a desperate infatuation guaranteed to be anything but harmless to a man bearing between his legs a spigot of wrinkled flesh."
After each of their (innocent) conversations, he returns to his hotel room and writes dialogues he wishes they'd had - dialogues full of passion and desire, starring He and She. The writing only inflames his ardour, and Zuckerman twists over that flame, agonized, enthralled.
"Isn't one's pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification ... ?" Roth writes. "Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification ... constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most."
Reading those lines in her Toronto bedroom, the journalist shivers, then underlines them twice, in pen. "Those three sentences," she thinks, "are the very definition of why writers write." Twelve hours later, she is on the phone with their author.
SHE
Is this really Nathan's last
novel?
HE
I believe so. It seems to me the last adventure. I wanted to bring it to a close. It's been nine books, which is many more than I ever could have imagined writing with this character at the centre of.
SHE
But wasn't it hard to say
goodbye?
HE
Not really. The chore was the same it always is, which is to write the book. I wasn't thinking about the end; I was thinking about how to go about writing it.
SHE
After so many books, does writing get harder or easier?
HE
(Laughing) It never seems to get easier. It's an ordeal. It's one I'm accustomed to, but it is an ordeal. I write standing up a good deal of the time, to save my poor old back.
He tells her that he writes in longhand at a standing desk, made by a company in Baltimore. He also uses a computer at a separate stand-up station and he has a desk at which he sits. She pictures him in his office day after day, revolving among these points as the Earth revolves.
SHE
How many hours a day do you write?
HE
Oh, too many. Somewhere between seven and eight. If the work has gone well, I'm energized by it. If it's gone badly I'm cast down. But then I start again the next day. The first six months are usually the most difficult. Over the long haul, as I get into a book and gain mastery over it, then I'm happy.
