On the range of literary criticism, Philip Roth has been targeted by Jews and Gentiles, literary authorities and laymen, as an exploitative, narrow-minded reinforcer of Jewish stereotypes; a writer who is dedicated to portraying, as one Rabbi editorialized several years ago in the New York Times, "a melancholy parade of caricatures." Some have even attacked his works as dangerous, dishonest, and irresponsible. Roth has rebuked these accusations from the time he was made famous in 1959 by Goodbye, Columbus, a novella and group of short stories about which Roth explained his use of Jewish characters and lifestyles as simply vehicles to portray universal themes. Many claimed Roth had depicted in this book the quintessential negative portrait of Jews and Jewishness.

In an essay for Commentary, ("Writing About Jews," Dec. 1963), Roth countered such assessments of this and subsequent books by saying of his critics:

Not only do they seem to me often to have cramped and untenable notions of right and wrong, but looking at fiction as they do—in terms of 'approval' and 'disapproval' of Jews, 'positive' and 'negative' attitudes toward Jewish life—they are likely not to see what it is that the story is really about …

Fiction is not written to affirm the principles and beliefs that everybody seems to hold, nor does it seek to guarantee us of the appropriateness of our feelings. The world of fiction, in fact, frees us from the circumscriptions that the society places upon feeling; one of the greatnesses of the art is that it allows both the writer and the reader to respond to experience in ways not always available in day-to-day conduct; or if they are available, they are not possible, or manageable, or legal, or advisable, or even necessary to the business of living.

With The Ghost Writer, Roth has written a fictional piece that reflects the philosophy of the 1963 essay through the somewhat autobiographical guise of his own experiences of becoming a writer. In this book, Roth discards much of the detailed descriptions of Jews and their lifestyles, the concentration upon sexual exploits, and a substantial amount of the blatant humor found in his earlier works, and concentrates instead on the preoccupation that an artist, in this case a writer, must have with his craft. Through this theme, explored through the personalities of two writers … Roth seems to retaliate against years of criticism with half-masked references to his own previous works, their intent, and the misinterpretations they suffered. On a deeper level, the book offers glimpses of the necessarily remote nature of an artist: the artist as an observer, not a true participant, in the systems, institutions, or mores of society….

In The Ghost Writer, Nathan Zuckerman, a young Jewish writer, searches for reasons to maintain his vision against the constraints and pressures of his family and the philosophy that they represent….

Nathan's quest leads him, "bashful and breathless," to an introverted, soft-spoken, meticulous man [Lonoff], a man whose ordered, seemingly intensely moral and domestic life is in direct contrast to that of Nathan, who is described as an "unchaste monk" by his ex-girlfriend…. Yet as Nathan spends the evening and next morning as a guest at the Lonoff's, he slowly begins to perceive a sense of things gone awry in the writer's home, and in his life. (p. 11)

Observing all of this, Nathan perhaps sees the inevitability of the clash between art and the rest of the moorings in his life…. Nathan begins to understand the lesson he has received from the master, a lesson which Lonoff himself is still perfecting: the belief in the absolution of art. The man as artist must be different from the man as participant in this world; but he must be both, even if only as an observer in the latter.

The reader is left with the idea that Nathan has joined the ethereal fraternity of artists where a member trains his thoughts on creativity, but keeps one foot very earth-bound…. In this imaginative novella, Roth initiates the complicated explanation of the artist's dilemma through the allegorical portrayal of Nathan's maturation as a writer, and at the same time seems to reaffirm his own faith in the art and in his previous works. (p. 27)