Who is the ghost writer in Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer? In this nouvelle of guilt about anti-Semitism, the ghost seems to be that of Anne Frank. Roth speaks of her as a "Jewish ghost," and writes of Anne's "seething passion to come back as an avenging ghost!" But Amy Bellette's delusion that she is Anne Frank rediviva cannot sustain the imaginative load the ghost writer carries. It is the madness of art, not the madness of Amy, that is required, so the ghost reveals itself finally as Henry James himself, a ghost that does the writing of the book.

Philip Roth invokes James by his quotations from and continual reference to the latter's short story, "The Middle Years." By a literary sleight of hand, however, he conceals another Jamesian story, "The Author of Beltraffio," for the main line of the plot of that long tale is the main line of the plot of The Ghost Writer. (p. 48)

Until The Breast (1972), in which Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" had acted as both a germinating idea and a formal constraint, Philip Roth's novels had been loose baggy monsters, while his short stories amounted to a certain kind of personal reportage set in a confessional mold. The reader felt Roth's obsessions constantly pushing their way to the foreground of the tale. Those obsessions were somewhat boring, consisting exclusively of Roth's sexual preoccupations mixed with memories of his courses in literature, concerns very typical today of certain young writers and artists.

But in The Breast Roth had shown he could take a literary model and develop it on his own terms with variety, ingenuity, and control. In his most recent book, The Ghost Writer, he has gone on in the same way to elaborate the nouvelle as the modern master of the genre, Henry James, had developed it, in order to make his own fable, which this time would satisfy his deeper feelings about family guilt as well as his more immediate, urgent sexual concerns. This has produced a fine short novel, in which he relies on Henry James, the clever artificer, for the shape of his plot, but in which also, Henry James turns out to be the virtual ghost writer…. (pp. 48-9)

The Ghost Writer follows The Breast in showing that Roth's attitude to literature has changed. This may be because he has begun to read James with an eye closer to the latter's fictional strategies than merely to the kinds of characters invented by the 19th-century American writer. James's narrative technique, developed persistently throughout his literary career, was to locate for the reader, in a literary classic within his story, some character or situation taken from it, and then to recreate the form of the classic itself through an original variation on it….

Roth sticks his neck out when he invites the reader to compare him to James, for placed against "The Author of Beltraffio" and "The Middle Years" his own legend suffers in those points where the models behind his story can be detected. Yet one must admire him for it. Roth is not doing a Jamesian story. He is making a modern version from the example of James's fiction. Is he saying that his masters today are not what the Ambients and the Dencombes, James's fictive writers, used to be? Their successors are the Lonoffs and the Abravanels, Roth's models, who are the Mailers and the Malamuds writing today. (p. 49)

Compared to James's Dencombe, there is something essentially wrong about Lonoff as a writer. He comes across as a man impervious to any personal impression, so he can concentrate on his art. His artistic process seems to lack the "passion" and "madness" ascribed to art by James and underlined by Lonoff. Is Roth trying to tell us that his hero, Nathan Zuckerman, rather, has the passion and the madness—the passion in his erotic fantasies, and the madness in his conversion of Amy to Anne Frank as atonement to his family? (p. 51)