At the age of forty-six, Philip Roth has relented. He has written a short and touching novel, The Ghost Writer, which is remarkably free of the zeal for settling scores that soured so much of his work. In place of the animosity he lavished on nouveau-riche vulgarians in Goodbye, Columbus, on repressive Jewish mothers in Portnoy's Complaint, and destructive Gentile wives in My Life As a Man, Roth has drawn the characters in The Ghost Writer with delicacy, compassion, and a tender respect for their honorable intentions….

Roth has endowed [Nathan Zuckerman, the troubled young Jewish writer,] with cultural sophistication and a fervent sense of literary vocation…. More important, he is obsessed … with the classic tension that plagues writers—the discordant demands of art and life.

Life has recently been battering Nathan's conscience because his father, after reading a long story his son has written about an ancient family scandal, has accused him of betraying the Jews by disclosing such vulgarity and greed to a hostile world ("not for the goyim")….

As we gradually learn, Nathan is still distressed by the rift with his father when he arrives, at the beginning of The Ghost Writer, at an isolated Berkshire farmhouse to visit the great American Jewish novelist, E. I. Lonoff. To be granted an audience by the legendary recluse is a rare privilege, and Nathan has come as an excited pilgrim to pay homage to and seek encouragement from this "ideal father" who is "an artist instead of a foot doctor." It is a situation rich in Jamesian echoes of the tales and novellas about the literary life, such as "The Lesson of the Master" and "The Figure in the Carpet," which Henry James was writing in the 1880's and 90's. The very opening of The Ghost Writer ("It was the last daylight hour of a December afternoon more than twenty years ago … when I arrived at his hideaway to meet the great man") is immediately reminiscent, though far more spare, of the first sentence of "The Author of Beltraffic."…

Lonoff and James, together, are the magisterial instructive presence for the young acolyte, but the novel abounds with other literary ghosts: Kafka, Chekhov, Babel, Flaubert, and, perhaps the ghostliest of all in Roth's view, himself when young. And this suggests what the title, with its sly play on words, means: that the imagination and craft of a writer are nourished so directly by the masters of the past that they become, in no invidious sense, his "ghost writers."

Roth seems eager to demonstrate, as he was in The Professor of Desire, his incorrigible literariness, as though this will flout those critics who have called him vulgar. (p. 72)

For all its self-mocking sassiness, The Ghost Writer is Roth's salute to his youthful courage in defying Jewish family pieties and committing himself to what James's dying novelist, in "The Middle Years," calls "the madness of art." Though Roth has defended himself strenuously throughout his career against the rabbis and the Wapters who accused him of abetting anti-Semitism, he has now brought the acrimonious debate into his fiction and, holding all the aces, he triumphs once again…. In their separate ways, Lonoff and James and the ghostly vision of Anne Frank [Amy Bellette] embolden the young writer to trust the tale, and thus set him free.

But free to do what? There is no question that Philip Roth is a very good writer, never more appealing, witty, unguarded, than in The Ghost Writer. It is the best thing he has done, a bright evocation of youth and age and the literary ardor and egotism that bind them. But if in the end the book also seems rather thin, it is because it promises an intellectual and moral range which it does not wholly attain. Roth seems reluctant to engage himself fully with the demanding question he asks in many different ways throughout the novel: must life be sacrificed to art, in the uncompromising manner of a Lonoff? After all, Nathan Zuckerman does not bring Anne Frank home as his bride; when morning comes, nothing has been settled.

The dilemma deserves more patient scrutiny than it receives in Hope Lonoff's impassioned outburst, in the closing scene, against her husband's "religion of art." Her indictment is like the curtain speech in a "well-made" play—an eloquent and conveniently tidy summation of all that has gone before. "Nothing can be touched," she cries, "nothing can be changed, everybody must be quiet, the children must shut up…. Not living is what he makes his beautiful fiction out of!" It is a stirring speech, for her grievances are not petty. But it is hard to know how Zuckerman (and Roth) respond to her denunciation. In his haste to wrap up the package with this rousing finale, Roth skirts the messy, inelegant complications within the enigmas that have brushed across his consciousness. He has not yet assimilated the lessons of the masters as well as he would like us to believe. (p. 73)