What if there had been a Jewish version of Henry James? In this marvellously controlled ironic novella [The Ghost Writer], Philip Roth has invented a bristlingly vivid Jewish James called E. I. Lonoff, a selfless patriarch of 'sympathy and pitilessness'. Then he unleashes a disciple on Lonoff, a young Jewish and rather Rothian writer who is comically eager to learn the lesson of the master. After a day of observing the 'terminal restraint' that passes for life in the Lonoff dacha in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts, young Nathan Zuckerman has learned a different lesson from the one he set out to get: one man's 'madness of art' is another man's poison.

In Henry James, the 'madness of art' must sponge out the bright colours of mere life. James's lesson is brutally clear: a man must choose either life or art, he can't have both. Roth, however, brilliantly revises James's lesson: according to the Ghost Writer the master and his lesson don't quite match. The son was born to make a ghost of his father. While the Ghost Writer stands figuratively on the shoulders of Henry James, one of its wittiest insights occurs when its nosey young hero stands literally on a volume of James so he can overhear the live-action Aspern papers of Lonoff's love life upstairs. The literary voyeur Nathan should have learned the lesson offered by his own experiences earlier in the evening: his inability to write a letter to his real father, his joyless masturbation on the master's daybed, and the intoxication when he reads 'The Middle Years', James's story of a destructive discipleship. All Nathan hears, of course, is a self-parodic renunciation scene as the master refuses to kiss the breasts of his presumed mistress, the pretty refugee Amy Bellette.

Roth's mercilessly compact plot shows that young Nathan will never achieve the moral and artistic scrupulousness of his literary father. At the same time, however, Roth's serene, cool, utterly assured style tells us that he, at least, has found his way through to the calm power of a novelist's 'middle years'. In The Ghost Writer he tries on a Jamesian Jewish mask as 'the Jew who got away', standing back from the ironies of life. The mask fits elegantly.

All along Roth's fiction, like the life-styles of his heroes, has been about performance. The Ghost Writer is a novel about performance too, since it is another public acting out of Roth's major theme of broken inheritance but it plays upon its theme by a marked absence of colourful gestures….

As David Plante has said, every 20th-century writer is a ghost of Henry James. We can't choose our fathers. All we can do is choose, like Roth, to reject them. The Ghost Writer's style is remarkably straight, cool and simple—un-Jamesian. Roth, never having had a Jamesian father, is telling us that he no longer needs one. There never was a Lonoff. American Jewish writers have had to make do with realist and folk-tale patriarchs like Abraham Cahan, Isaac Babel and I. B. Singer, with martyrs like Kafka and Anne Frank, and with the contemporary performers. So Lonoff is a ghost, a fiction, the sort of writer an impressionable young man might imagine finding in an isolated house in the mountains. In The Ghost Writer Philip Roth says in the most sharp firm way that he is very much alive and kicking those 'ideological Benya Kriks' in New York from this own hide-out in the Berkshires. And he has got away with it too; The Ghost Writer is a well-tempered triumph.