Word: ghosts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Ghost Writer, Philip Roth...
FICTION: A Bend in the River, V.S.Naipaul ∙Collected Stories, Paul Bowles ∙Living in the Maniototo, Janet Frame ∙Mirabell: Books of Number, James Merrill ∙Sophie's Choice, William Styron ∙The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth ∙The Living End, Stanley Elkin NONFICTION: Blood of Spain, Ronald Fraser ∙I Love: The Story of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Lili Brik, Ann and Samuel Charters ∙The Duke of Deception, Geoffrey Wolff ∙The Medusa and the Snail, Lewis Thomas ∙The Neoconservatives, Peter Steinfels ∙The White Album, Joan Didion ∙When Memory Comes, Saul Friedlander
...Ghost Writer promises the incredible with the suggestion that Anne Frank is alive and working at Harvard's library. But Roth steps back from the inviting brink of fantasy. He retreats, in fact, to the drab reality of the 1950s, the time of his own spectacular debut as the author of Goodbye, Columbus. The new book retains the look, if not the actual furniture, of autobiography. Goodbye, Columbus is called Higher Education; its author is Nathan Zuckerman who, like Roth, was raised in a middle-class Jewish section of Newark. His story is based on a family embarrassment...
...real Amy curtly evades Nathan's questions about her background. She is a smart and very tough cookie. As is Lonoff; as is Zuckerman; as is Roth himself. The Ghost Writer is a bruising book. Within its artfully tangled plot, Roth tells off his critics and debunks romantic notions of the writing life. Henry James' "passion of doubt" and "madness of art" become a medieval incubus and fanatic patience; Lonoff, more the ascetic Old World Jew than his Yankee trappings might indicate, spends all his time pushing sentences around and worrying about them. His comment on writing...
...comes dangerously close to unimaginable Holocaust humor. It is funny and embarrassing at the same time, a God-forbidden break in decorum that allows the anarchic spirit out for a breath of air. Roth has always excelled at this, and if the reader is offended, The Ghost Writer strongly suggests that it is not the author's problem.-R.Z. Sheppard