Whatever else a story may do, its one indispensable element is the imagination's first premise: what if?… What if a petty clerk in Prague should awaken one morning to find that he has become an enormous insect, or what if Franz Kafka himself should survive his bout with tuberculosis in 1924, live long enough to have to flee the Nazis, and emigrate to Newark, N.J., just in time to become Philip Roth's Hebrew schoolteacher? Such is the premise of what is surely Roth's finest piece of short fiction, "'I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting'; or, Looking at Kafka."…

Here is an example of the writer pushing his premises as far as he can until some other consideration, some reality principle, pushes back. Franz Kafka can be kept alive long enough to get to Newark, but he can't be restored to confident sexual manhood…. To suppose otherwise might make a good story, but it would be about another man, not Kafka. Take another example: What if Anne Frank could have survived the Holocaust and emigrated to America to become a student—a coed—at a small college near Stock-bridge, Mass.? And what if, some years later, she should meet up with Nathan Zuckerman, a young writer from Newark, who is about Roth's age and is currently in hot water throughout Essex County because of a story he has written, featuring his own family, that is taken to be anti-Semitic? Stop there. The difficulties are immediately obvious. Anne Frank can't be reinvented like Franz Kafka. Kafka was so wholly of the imagination that it remains his medium even after his death, but Anne Frank belongs to history, and to a history so tragic and irredeemable that the imagination has to feel a little chastened before it. But what if our Zuckerman, whose fantasy life sometimes overpowers him as it should in a writer, were only to imagine that a young woman he meets might be Anne Frank, and that for his own personal motives that is just another reason to fall in love with her? Then you have Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer, a book about how Anne Frank might be invented by a young man who has need of imagining her.

This encounter takes place at the isolated country home of the writer, E. I. Lonoff…. Lonoff is a recluse who has renounced all passions except those of his art, and a master of style who has devoted his life to le mot juste, or turning sentences around and around until he has gotten them right. (p. 213)

This is the least tendentious of Roth's books, far more the bemused slice of life than the anguished self-exculpation. Here, it is the other guy's marriage that is on the rocks. Lonoff has chosen the perfection of the work over the perfection of the life, and Roth looks on the consequences with detachment. Maybe it is Lonoff's own imperturbability, his peculiar absence of conflict or normal passion, that robs the moment of its desperation, but situations that were disastrous in earlier books are merely ironic in this one.

Even the element of self-examination here is quite unlike the turbulent self-inquisition we have come to expect of Roth, since it is not destructive motives that are being mercilessly interrogated but the imagination itself. Accordingly, the regressive portions of the personality that elsewhere have been central take a back seat to such considerations as history and literature. The Roth who wrote this book is the Roth who edits the "Writers From the Other Europe" series for Penguin Books and spends much of his time in London or Prague in the company of Czech writers like Milan Kundera, to whom he dedicates this book, and Ludvik Vaculik. It is the Roth, in other words, who has set his sights on becoming a European novelist. (p. 215)

[The Ghost Writer] finds Roth poised ambiguously between his old obsession with sexual failure and domestic crisis and a more recent concern with history on the tragic plane, but unable to take the full plunge into matters on which he has so tenuous a grasp. Here, and in The Professor of Desire, he introduces some catastrophe of historic proportions—the Holocaust or the Soviet rape of Czechoslovakia—and then scales the story down to the level of a domestic blowup that seems quite beside the point. Even while his imagination wrestles with horrors of world-historical magnitude, his writing stays close to what he knows firsthand.

Yet Roth can scarcely be blamed for playing coy with the Holocaust and allowing his Zuckerman only to imagine the experiences Amy Bellette [the imagined Anne Frank figure] has come through. The fictional medium does not yield to simple outrage…. (pp. 215-16)

No idea lends itself to fiction except through a strategy of presentation, and Roth, who has not been a student of Henry James for nothing, knows that better than anyone. The strategy of placing Anne Frank's double in Stockbridge in 1956 and introducing her to Nathan Zuckerman gives Roth freedom to invent characters, entertain fantasies, and shuttle at will between continents, which are now only places in the mind, while any direct assault on history would have closed off these possibilities. And yet, for my taste, The Ghost Writer could have been bolder with its modest premises and taken a few more risks. This is Roth's most restrained book since When She Was Good, and his circumspection is certainly in keeping with the hazardous nature of his themes. Still, I'd like to know more about the Lonoff who does Durante imitations in the bedroom and less about that perfect equanimity and dedication. Unless we can imagine that there is something fairly wild lurking beneath all that composure, Lonoff must seem an unappealing figure…. His canons of reticence give us not a clue, and Roth, for once, has settled for telling us far less than we want to know. (p. 216)