The Ghost Writer transcends the label "ghost story" in its balanced artistry and its dead certainty of language. While Lonoff and Nathan Zuckerman discuss a mutual writer-acquaintance, Abravanel …, one sees Lonoff to be a simple man who shuns any form of success or social life. There is everywhere the balance between Lonoff's genius and his pathetic domesticity….

There is also the primal balance of young and old (Nathan and Lonoff, his literary father; Nathan and Doc Zuckerman, his real father, a pitiable figure who tries to keep Nathan from publishing a story about the Zuckerman family; young Amy and the middle-aged Hope Lonoff, rivals the whole way through). But best of all there are the subtle balances that make fiction into art. Roth balances the weather outside the house with the storm inside. While snow pelts against the eaves, setting an eerie mood, one sees Roth in complete control….

[In] all the stories that meet in Roth's narrative, there is the ghost that haunts the writer who cannot rest unless he is in the process of writing. Lonoff demonstrates to Nathan that what happens in the life of a really talented writer does not matter. Events cannot be controlled, but they must be written down….

Lonoff is a fatalist. Yet he gets through life unscathed because the events of his world that he cannot control pose no threat to him—his world is as "fantastic" and as harmless as breakfast cereal. In The Ghostwriter all fantasy—art, the ideal life, the dreams of raising children to emulate their parents, even the young girl that both men are attracted to—is made to seem sugar-coated and unreal.

Yet it is the insubstantial nature of these things that makes characters complex. When ideals and dreams conflict with the facts as they are and with other people's ideals and dreams, we realize that something must give….

Full of the irony of the first-person voice that has always been the strength of Roth's work—"something that begins at the back of the knees and reaches well above the head" (the quality that Lonoff says he admires most in Nathan's writing)—The Ghost Writer has a voice that is stronger than the loudest speech. Recently Roth's voice has grown teeth, and The Ghost Writer bites into the heart of the artistic enterprise.