The Ghost Writer must be initially examined from the context of the Bildungsroman because Roth has so deliberately placed it in this context. After focusing on the novel as a work of fiction within a clearly defined tradition, then the critic can look to the narrative for parallels to the author's life and insights into his growth and development. In comparing the novel with its predecessors we can not only evaluate its departures from that tradition but also assess Roth's implications about the viability of this form in late twentieth-century fiction…. Roth's late twentieth-century Bildungsroman protagonist typically searches for a father and simultaneously flees both a father and all the suitable father substitutes, a fashion that bears the mark of the late twentieth-century fragmentation which has eroded family ties and given rise to homelessness. Thus in a pattern that is repeated throughout The Ghost Writer, the tradition of the Bildungsroman is both utilized and corrupted, adopted and rejected. (pp. 88-9)

[The] neglect of Nathan's childhood in The Ghost Writer may initially appear inconsistent in a Bildungsroman, for, aside from short reminiscences of family Sundays, the place where he copped his first feel, the sting of a mother's slap, and the memory of a father relegated to "Doc" in the neighborhood because he was a podiatrist and not a physician, Nathan spends little time reflecting on his childhood. Yet the other central concerns of the Bildungsroman are very much the stuff of which The Ghost Writer is made—provinciality, alienation, the larger society, ordeal by love, and the search for a vocation and a working philosophy. Even, however, when Roth's themes are traditional, his treatment can be personal and idiosyncratic, and herein lie the vitality and viability of the form which lends itself to adaptation and hence to different cultural contexts.

The typical Bildungsroman usually begins with its child hero somewhere in the country … and follows him to the city and maturity. The myth of growth recognizes that the postulant must undergo a trial, and the foreign environment of the city is the most likely place for this important step. Roth accepts the movement, the clash of lifestyles, and the trial, but it is clearly not possible to take a boy brought up in Newark and educated in Chicago and send him off to the city. So for Nathan the situation needs to be reversed. Vir urbi must go off to the country, and Roth insures that Lonoff's world is as different from Nathan's as it can be. In fact, Lonoff's pastoral retreat is all that Nathan ever thought he wanted. There a writer, surrounded by natural beauty, can indulge himself throughout the day in all of the cerebral pleasures he ever dreamed of. The house has books, magazines, records, typewriters, and quiet. At night there is conjugal bliss and there are admirers—both male and female—to stroke the delicate artistic ego. Lonoff has all of this—all that Nathan aspires to—and he is miserable.

Even though the movement of The Ghost Writer contradicts the traditional town-country formula, the novel nevertheless retains the provincial environment that the incipient artist must escape. Newark's Jewish society is clannish, narrow, and suspicious of outside ideas. The best Jewish Newark has to offer is Judge Leopold Wapter, a man idolized by Doc Zuckerman and his generation. Wapter represents the Jew who has gained position and esteem in the Gentile world…. The stifling environment that Nathan must repudiate is well represented in Judge Wapter's reaction to one of Nathan's short stories. The judge responds to the manuscript of the story with a letter to its author which is a rhetorical masterpiece of manipulation…. Clearly this environment is hostile to art, to creativity, and to imagination; the only ideas it will tolerate are those which do not threaten complacency or conformity. The artist must leave his provincial home or repudiate his art, for significant fiction cannot flourish in the sterile soil of Newark.

If Roth manipulates the urban-rural conflict to suit the demands of his age and his own purposes as well, he treats the artistic questions of The Ghost Writer as seriously and traditionally as Joyce did in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. More than any other work, it is this novel which Roth invites us to have in mind as we read The Ghost Writer, and more than any other literary predecessor, it is Stephen who provides inspiration for Nathan. In fact the important second chapter is called "Nathan Dedalus" in case the reader misses Roth's implied comparison of the two. Like Stephen, Nathan aspires to become a serious writer. Like Stephen, he comes from an environment that neither understands nor encourages artistic achievement. Both young artists are sensitive souls who are frequently insensitive to those around them, and both are alienated from their backgrounds. Significantly, both protagonists eventually say "no."… Ultimately, then, just as Portrait is about art and its relationship to the artist as well as to society, so too is The Ghost Writer. A part of the achievement of this book comes from the amount of material on this subject Roth can work into a short novel without sounding preachy or polemical. Both books agree that the artist is inevitably a misunderstood man, condemned to insoluble conflicts, confusion, and solitude. (pp. 89-92)

The Ghost Writer presents a variety of attitudes about art for Nathan and the reader to consider. Nathan, himself, appears initially as the unashamed lover of art…. Lonoff is a realist. He knows that art is not glamorous. His art consists in pushing sentences across a page and turning them around. Lonoff is wholly dedicated to his work, yet it is a merciless master that holds him in thrall. (pp. 92-3)

Roth presents the two main women of the novel as also holding views of art which contrast dramatically with those of the idealistic Nathan. Like her husband, Hope, too, has no illusions after thirty-five years of ascetic existence. The husband who refuses dinner invitations and tyrannizes the members of his household rejects life. "Not living is what he makes … fiction out of," she screams, and in a colossal effort of will, she rejects his living death…. Amy, on the other hand, is a pragmatist; art for her is a means. At age sixteen she presented herself to Lonoff as a "highly intelligent, creative, and charming" refugee who wanted a new start in life. She became his student, his editor, his accomplice, and yearned to become his mistress and muse. (p. 93)

Roth uses Felix Abravanel to represent the most calculated approach to art in The Ghost Writer…. Abravanel in his five-hundred-dollar shantung suit accompanied by his young, "juicy" mistress, Andrea, soon proved to be the artist very much in the world and of the world…. [The] full irony of Nathan's rejection of Abravanel and embracing of Lonoff appears only in [Zuckerman Unbound], the sequel to The Ghost Writer, where we find Zuckerman the successful and worldly novelist, pursuing a career much more like that of the celebrated Abravanel than that of the reclusive Lonoff.

The alienation of son from father is a familiar theme in the Bildungsroman, from the hatred felt by Henry in Stendhal's La Vie de Henri Brulard to the haughty disdainfulness of Stephen smirking when his father calls him a bitch. No alienation is so important or so potentially permanent as the repudiation of the faith of one's fathers…. Nathan's father is more involved in his son's life and writing than the elder Dedalus, and he senses Nathan's apostasy even before his visit to upstate New York. The cause for his alarm is Nathan's story "Higher Education," based directly on recent family history…. Doc Zuckerman's pride for the son written up in Saturday Review is dampened by the shame he feels for a family incident best forgotten. How can his naive son know how such a story will be perceived in the world? "It's not your fault that you don't know what Gentiles think when they read something like this. But I can tell you. They don't think about how it's a great work of art—they read about people. And they judge them as such. And how do you think they will judge the people in your story, what conclusions do you think they will reach?"… Nathan's inexperience leaves him ill-prepared for the world outside Newark…. Nathan flees from his father, from Newark, from his heritage, and from his past to the writers' retreat at Quahsay, and he is thus prepared for the visit to Lonoff which will conclude his conversion.

In the evening spent at the Lonoffs, Nathan exchanges Judaism for art, his new religion, a process which may have begun at the University of Chicago. Every minute in the presence of the man he histrionically calls the "chief rabbi, the archdeacon, the magisterial high priest of perpetual sorrows" confirms him in his decision…. Nathan's narrative is informed throughout by the language of religion. (pp. 93-5)

What is this new religion for which Nathan sacrifices the Judaism of his fathers? It is a faith with some hope but with even greater elements of frustration, misunderstanding, and disappointment. (p. 95)

[Nathan] shares another important characteristic with the earlier Bildungsroman artist: both he and Stephen are often not very likeable…. But when Nathan's self-absorption irritates the reader who shares the despair of the spurned Hope and the grieving parents who helplessly watch their son rejecting family and religion, he is redeemed much as the headstrong Emma and stubborn Stephen by the sustained internal view the narrative provides. (p. 96)

Likewise, both Stephen and Nathan are redeemed by the paucity of choice offered the reader. If we must choose between the narrow xenophobic world of Newark's elderly Jewish community and Nathan's art, our sympathies will surely rest with the hope of youth as certainly as the tradition of Latin comedy ensures that the audience will sympathize with young lovers and scoff at aged fathers who only obstruct. Stephen's family does not understand him any more than Nathan's parents understand their son, but rather than view the family schism as tragic, both novels treat this subject in the broad perspective of comedy. (p. 97)

Nathan's spontaneity, artlessness, and honesty humanize him in a way that guarantees the reader's sympathy.

Nathan's honesty has its limits, however. He can evaluate his own shortcomings, he can deprecate his literary endeavors and even acknowledge his immaturity to the reader. In remembering his relationship with Betsy he frankly recounts his infidelities…. In a cloud of penitential gloom he abandoned Betsy and their relationship, and in The Ghost Writer the youthful heart is ready to be re-engaged. Thus it is that Nathan allows himself to be totally beguiled by the mysterious Amy. For Nathan she becomes Anne Frank so completely that it is only with difficulty that he can call her by her own name. Amy-Anne represents for Nathan a chance to live a life of romance and adventure rather than imagining it. The illusion he conjures offers Nathan an opportunity to gain the respect of his family and to humiliate the self-righteous Wapters who have accused him of disloyalty. What an impression he could make in Newark with the reincarnated modern Jewish saint as his bride!

Nathan's love ordeal is as real and as painful as that of Pip's in Great Expectations. Unlike Pip, Nathan has not been manipulated by others to hope for and expect a relationship that the reader knows to be impossible; like Pip, however, Nathan participates fully in his own deception…. [The] ordeal Nathan puts himself through because of the beautiful immigrant in the Lonoffs' home reveals to Nathan and the reader his uncertainties and insecurities. What the reader suspects all along becomes quite clear: Nathan does care about his heritage, and he yearns to accommodate both his family and his own artistic aspirations. With Anne Frank as his wife, Nathan would not have to defend his commitment to his Jewish heritage to anyone, and he would be free to write even about family members who strike the young author as amusing. The reality he slowly and painfully has to accept is that Amy is not Anne Frank, and that no one can magically legitimize Nathan's fiction to a suspicious Jewish society. If the Nathan of the final page of The Ghost Writer is more mature and more experienced, he is also sadder and wiser. He came to Lonoff's house to learn the secrets of the great writer. Instead he found that his idol had feet of mud, not porcelain, and the main secrets he learns are discoveries about himself.

The Ghost Writer has been read as if it is several different books; in fact, the variety of comment it provoked upon publication may qualify the novel as Roth's most misunderstood work. Reviewers saw it as a roman à clef and dutifully identified the characters and places for readers unfamiliar with the landscape of contemporary American fiction. The book was described as being in the manner of authors as different as Chekhov, Tolstoy, and James; it was termed "an anecdote with interruptions" and "fiction once removed." It was critiqued as if it were really the story of Amy, not Nathan, and it was accused of the basest kind of irreverence for exhuming "that little pile of bones on Belsen heath" for use in a Holocaust romance. What The Ghost Writer has not been read for is Roth's contemporary treatment of the Bildungsroman, yet in many respects this novel is his most traditional work. In adapting the Bildungsroman to the mid-twentieth century, Roth simultaneously shows the viability of the form and the archaic aspects of the form as well. Ultimately, the importance of the Bildungsroman as a genre of fiction may be primarily historical, and the type may have had its greatest significance in the context of the development of modernism from the mid-nineteenth century through the first quarter of the twentieth century. But The Ghost Writer, by following many of the conventions of the Bildungsroman, demonstrates conclusively that the form is not moribund in the right hands; it may, perhaps, be now in the process of change. We are unlikely to see late twentieth-century Bildungsromanen following a young man from the innocent provinces to the worldly city where he encounters challenges and disappointments which mold him into manhood. But the search for self during the agonizing period of growth, accompanied by the strong personal commitment of the novelist to his subject, are likely to be legitimate concerns of serious fiction-to-come, just as they were in novels in the past. The Ghost Writer fulfills enough of the criteria of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman to qualify as a part of that tradition; more importantly, however, by shifting some of the emphases of the genre, it may serve as a useful bridge to refinement and further development of the form in the future. (pp. 98-100)