Interpretative fantasies, from Clarissa and Tristram Shandy to Finnegans Wake, Pale Fire, and Gravity's Rainbow, have traditionally concerned themselves with such problems as "validity," "discursivity," and "reality" vs. "textuality," particularly with the status of fictional texts, their origins, ends, and authoritative power. Philip Roth's recent novel, The Ghost Writer, is part of this tradition: it is about origins, and the problems of originality that any serious writer eventually comes to face. It is the kind of novel that forces us to reflect upon the act of writing, in a traditional sense, as an embodiment of "selfhood," and less traditionally, as the place where the "self" may be lost in the warp and woof of the text. In this first-person narration of writer Nathan Zuckerman's quest for a spiritual and aesthetic father, Roth presents us with a parodic reflection upon the notion of "textuality," or language in search of its source of power and authority, orphaned by the very contingencies that make it come into being. Yet the parody here is paradoxical and serious; the novel is a kind of "deconstruction" that mines both customary and revolutionary notions of inspiration, influence, interpretation, authority and literary production. That this comes from one of our finest parodists, whose greatest success thus far is a send-up of the autobiography or confession in Portnoy's Complaint, where ideas of "self" and "generation" are comically considered, is unsurprising. In The Ghost Writer, Roth renews his essential concern with the limits of writing and fiction.

One first notices that The Ghost Writer is filled with "texts." Among these are the forgotten stories of E. I. Lonoff, a Jewish writer who, years ago, escaped civilization for the Thoreauvian respite of his country home in the Berkshires. Lonoff's response to the tedious question, "how do you write?" is a wearying parody of the writing process: "'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.'" There is the text of The Ghost Writer itself, narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, a novelist who bears a ghostly resemblance to the Philip Roth, and who recounts his two-day stay with Lonoff "more than twenty years ago—I was twenty-three, writing and publishing my first short stories, and like many a Bildungsroman hero before me, already contemplating my own massive Bildungsroman."… Within this double textual inversion—Zuckerman the hero of the fiction he will one day write—we are given Zuckerman's reading of Henry James's "The Middle Years" late at night as he examines the riches of Lonoff's study: James's story tells how an author, reading his own latest novel, is led through an encounter with a young admirer to assess the value of his life and art. His imagination stirred by James, by Lonoff, and by a vigorously overhead encounter between Lonoff and the surrogate daughter/lover who lives in the house as a "research assistant," Zuckerman produces another text. He recounts an internalized fiction in which the girl, Amy Bellette, is revealed to be Anne Frank, now in America, in disguise, anguished over the fact that she has had to disown yet another text, her famous diary, so that it might not lose its effectiveness as a dispossessed portrayal of dispossession. And, within this infinite regress of texts, there are dozens of references to other writers—James, Kafka, Hemingway, I. B. Singer, Isaac Babel, Poe, Joyce, Mann, Felix Abravanel (a thinly disguised combination of Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow)—as well as a barrage of fragmentary marginal discourses in The Ghost Writer, including letters, recorded conversations, and Lonoff's underlinings of everything from James to articles on the television industry.

Summary alone of the flurry of texts in the novel creates a kind of fictive vertigo. We are compelled to wonder if Roth is not attempting to write what Roland Barthes has referred to as an "ideal," infinite text, wherein "the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text … has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one." Such attempts, Barthes avers, must fail, but the Chinese-box effect of receding texts in The Ghost Writer, like the labyrinthine intertextuality of John Barth's LETTERS or the fragmented textual archaeology of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow suggests, by implication, the possibility of an "infinite" text. Roth's novel may be seen as a vortex in which "texts," kinds of discourse—Roth's, Zuckerman's, Lonoff's, James's, Anne Frank's—whirl about disconnectedly, collide, and vanish, their "authority" and literalness subverted.

Roth is an unusually economic writer, and the spare fiction The Ghost Writer is may seem too frail, indeed too "ghostly," to support the weight of entangled discussions of textuality. Yet this slight narrative is laden with references to, and inversions of, acts of perception and interpretation that cause us to question the critical act of making, and reading, fictions. We know, for example, of Roth's debt here to Henry James, who established for modern fiction the relative, changeable relationship between the viewer and the view, the reader and the text. James's "The Middle Years" is quoted and summarized in The Ghost Writer, and the narrative "framing" of Roth's novel, in its inverted complexity, resembles that of James's classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw. There, we never know what the "true story" is, but if we approach the narrative from the outside moving in, we listen to a series of narrators as we make our way through a maze of texts that allows us to approach, though never to uncover, the "real" events at Bly. (pp. 365-67)

So too, in The Ghost Writer, a phantom double, in many respects, of James's tale, there are a series of narrative inversions. A diagram of the narrative frames in Roth's novel reveals a spare fiction with a highly complex structure…. (p. 368)

The consequences of the narrative structure in Roth's novel are similar to those elicited by The Turn of the Screw, but with some interesting differences. By the time we get to the last false bottom of The Ghost Writer, the events of a diary contained within a story imagined by the younger version of the narrator to whom we are listening, the sense of "story" has been entirely destroyed for us, and what the novel seems to be about is the parallel lives different kinds and levels of discourse lead. The encounter between Zuckerman and Lonoff, which might be termed the subject of the former's recollection, takes up only part of our attention: a dinner with Lonoff and his wife, Hope, a halting after-dinner conversation, and a brief meeting between master and epigone the next morning amidst a chaos of departures is all there is to the "story." The bulk of the novel is given over to preamble, reflection, transcription, interpretation—to the many other "texts'" of The Ghost Writer.

Unlike The Turn of the Screw, The Ghost Writer does not encourage us to traverse a series of narrative screens in order to reach a central, if unrelatable text. Rather, the texts of Roth's novel seem ghostly, orphaned repetitions of each other, leading nowhere, resonating with the false notes of self-conscious, dispossessed "fictions." (p. 369)

The textual inversions and displacements … are complicated and deepened by the metaphorical search for self and parent that comprises nearly the entire "plot" of The Ghost Writer. The quest for or questioning of parental authority parallels the fictional pursuit or denial of origin, source, and authority, those qualities that confer upon the "word" of the novel its value and validity, its reflective authenticity. (p. 370)

The refusal of parenthood and the lack of generation in The Ghost Writer is almost parodically self-evident. While Zuckerman is having difficulties establishing a relationship with his spiritual father, he has already, through his art, alienated his real father. His most recent story, "Higher Education," is a humorous portrayal of an aunt's determination to put her twin sons through medical school by selling roof shingles and siding…. Zuckerman's tale of his relative's moxie enrages his father, who declares that it represents only the partial truth about "Jewish family life," a story that the goyim will hold up as proof of stereotypical greed, stubbornness, and family in-fighting…. The partial, treacherous words of the story parallel the shattering of the bond between father and son, the thwarted passing on of life and "truth."

Other texts in The Ghost Writer reflect a similar pattern. (pp. 371-72)

The separation that texts engender is revealed with the greatest complexity in Zuckerman's "story" about Amy Bellette, née Anne Frank. Anne's Diary is the most dramatically orphaned text in The Ghost Writer, its author denying her existence as she lives under a pseudonym in America, refusing her father, Otto, the knowledge that his daughter is still alive: the denial of parentage to the text concurs with the denial of the biological parent. Anne's self-abnegation as the originator and author of the Diary occurs for good reasons. She feels it will lose impact if the dead girl who is its heroine reappears, a live ghost. But the power of textuality has been purchased at a great price, for Amy wonders if "having outlived the death camps, if masquerading here in New England as somebody other than herself did not make something very suspect—and a little mad—of this seething passion to 'come back' as the avenging ghost."… That is, she has had to make herself ghostly, like the dead girl in the Diary, in order for the memoir to survive; authorial suicide is committed in the generation of the text as its creator vanishes, reappearing only as the phantom avenger behind the text who pursues revenge upon the criminals who have "killed" her. (pp. 372-73)

In essence, Zuckerman's narration of the writing of the Diary and the fate of its author exhibits the vertiginous prospect of a live girl pretending to be dead, reflecting upon a text she wrote when she was "alive," talking to a phantom about the fact of her own emotional ghostliness in relation to her parents, embodied in her continual nightmare of being orphaned. In a double negation, she disinherits her text while orphaning herself from her real father. Zuckerman's fiction about Amy (itself authorless, since Zuckerman quickly denies its validity to himself the next morning) is a textual hall of mirrors in which authors are reflected only as ghostly progenitors of texts that, themselves, threaten to vanish if authorship or parenthood is put under question. (pp. 373-74)

Of all the authors in The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman plays the dead man's game most avidly. He is a marvel of self-effacement as he takes on the role of humble supplicant before the "master," Lonoff…. Through his fiction, Zuckerman has established his filial relation to Lonoff, but it is one in which the strong will of the son, his word, is subsumed by a spurious parental authority. The disparity between the psychological importance Zuckerman detects in his relationship with Lonoff and the "reality" of the situation is comic (we hardly need Roth's nudging pun) but it also reflects the complex sexual aspect of the problem of authority and textuality the novel pursues. Zuckerman can "write" his fiction about Amy because he revels in his voyeuristic vision of Lonoff ("Dad-da") consoling his "little girl," Amy, on his knee while Zuckerman stands on a book (James's "The Middle Years") so that he can overhear their conversation in the room above him. The psychological reversion of this comically Oedipal scene matches the byzantine textual complexity of the novel. It is an allegorical rendering of the son's, Zuckerman's, accession to a ludicrous and impotent patrimony, a relation in which self-effacement and masturbation—Zuckerman's response to Amy's late night entry into her bedroom—are the exercises through which the text is generated. Distancing, effacement, submission, all seem to be activities that Zuckerman must partake of in order to become the literary son who will one day, himself, become a full-fledged author.

But all of these serious considerations are travestied when we think about the form of The Ghost Writer. In a novel that uses the concept of narrative framing to undermine the accepted relationship between text and author, text and text, text and "reality," the final irony comes with our realization that The Ghost Writer is itself "framed" by its formal function as a parody…. The Ghost Writer parodies the formal constraints of many different "texts." It is a Künstlerroman in which Zuckerman seriously portrays his quest for artistic maturity, but the novel is more apparently an imitation of the "growth of the artist" that ridicules the entire notion of an artistic son searching for an artistic father, whether he be an individual figure, literary tradition, or some historic geist to which the apprentice submits himself even while he rebels. The birth of the artist portrayed in The Ghost Writer is hilariously incongruent, especially when we consider the principals involved: Zuckerman, supplicating before the inconsequential Lonoff, or lusting after the "femme fatale" Amy, really an intelligent but uninspiring co-ed from the local educational institution, Athene College. The novel is also a parody of James's The Turn of the Screw as well as of Roth's own Portnoy's Complaint: it burlesques the narrative inversions and ghosts of the former while parroting the confessionalism, psychological confusions, and "Jewish life" of the latter. (The fact that Portnoy's Complaint is, itself, a parody of the autobiography seems more than appropriate.) Within the novel, there is the presentation and parodying of Anne's Diary, and of the process of excerpting, revising, and commenting upon texts—the act and art of interpretation. This parodying of several texts is yet another manifestation of the novel's concern with "textuality." Parody is usually defined as an imitation of an original for the purposes of ridicule, burlesque, criticism, or reinvention. The thoroughly parodic nature of The Ghost Writer defines its lack of "originality," its status as imitation, ever removed from its literary sources in the Künstlerroman, the confession, or the autobiography. The novel is a text made of texts that mimic and duplicate other texts. It lacks the definitive text that would authorize all the others and ground them in some version of the "true" or "real" from which their variation would suggest some traditionally interpretable source of meaning.

We may then see Roth's novel as a kind of deconstructive fantasy in which some important relations, those between artistic fathers and sons, authors and texts, texts and meanings, are questioned and parodied. But the textual problems and inversions that the novel raises might also be seen as parodic: Roth could be ridiculing here the of times spurious and overly intricate complications promoted by some recent theoretical considerations of textuality, reading, and interpretation. Opposed to the present-day critical Byzantium, Roth could be offering a return to "reality" that contrasts with the prodigiously self-conscious fictionalizing that takes place in the novel. (pp. 374-77)

But the "reality" of The Ghost Writer is also questioned and parodied, so that if Roth is offering any alternatives to the intricacies of écriture, they are ambiguous and, themselves, undermined. Hope may seem some figure out of medieval allegory who will lead Everyman to the bliss of concreteness, but she is "in reality" a carping woman whose world is confined to the task of piecing together domestic fragments…. Amy is childish and petulant, and seems in person only a ghostly, immature reflection of the Amy/Anne whom Zuckerman creates. The "real" Lonoff is fussy and pedantic, as Hope describes him, a petty domestic tyrant…. [The] fictions of the novel, no matter how unrestrained, invalidated, uncalled for, and unreliable, no matter how "unreal," seem much more satisfying and inspired, certainly more "original," than these portrayals of the novel's "real" characters. Amidst the flurry of disappearing texts that The Ghost Writer embodies, Roth engages the old conflict between fiction and reality without attempting to resolve it; clearly, his reduction of "reality" in the novel to merely one level of discourse among many, through the use of parody, suggests this. The effect of The Ghost Writer's parodies, inversions, and refractions is to make us question the search for "validity" and "reality" in literary texts, that critical discovery of certain origins, grounds, and meanings which, traditionally, comprises the act of interpretation and from which Roth's labyrinthine discourse disinherits us. He thus creates a fiction whose "meaning" is embodied in the unravellings of its constructions and in the wake of its vanishings. The novel thereby generates the anxiety and doubt of the reader confronting a text, or the author confronting "life," forging scandalously out of that uncertain relation the unreliable, unfounded fictions produced by reading and writing. Analogically, Zuckerman's confession stands as a parodic attempt to deny the artistic and "real" fathers in whom reside the origins of self, life, inspiration, authority, and the seminality of meaning. Ultimately, The Ghost Writer unmoors us from certainty, and convinces us to agree with James's Dencombe that "'Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task,'" to accept the doubt about the nature of "reality" that inspires the "task" of art. If so, then Roth has conceived a most passionate portrayal of our doubt, as we observe the ghostly productions of the imagination. (pp. 377-78)