Sixty years after Joyce published his [bildungsroman known as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man], its themes sound hackneyed: a youth caught between his vision of the truth and the sentimental, institutionalized beliefs of his elders; the artist escaping from the world of his father through flights of fancy that become fact. To redeem this adolescent fantasy from the storehouse of cultural commonplaces, a writer has just two choices. The serious approach already canonized, Philip Roth applied his comic vision to the task. The Ghost Writer, haunted as much by Henry James as by James Joyce, is the result.

The story concerns Nathan Zuckerman, at one point called Nathan Dedalus, a young writer of promise who visits master of the short story, E. I. Lonoff, at his country home. Borrowed from James's "The Lesson of the Master," this device yields for Roth more than an examination of the demands of art, for although he agrees with James that a writer's domestic and creative lives will conflict, Roth delights in the chaos that results. The outlines of James's tale remain: Zuckerman and Lonoff discuss their lives and work; "the great man" warns his protégé not to follow his example (that is, to live a life so devoid of experience that he can write only fantasies); the advice proves less valuable than the young man's final recognition that he cannot but follow Lonoff's example.

But Lonoff and Zuckerman's conversations do not, as in James's tale, remain the center of attention; much less do they glorify genius or prescribe a code for writers to live by. Instead, domestic confrontations and internal struggles dominate. Romantic notions of "the grueling, exalted, transcendent calling" fizzle as the Lonoffs squabble and Zuckerman frets over his own family troubles, especially his father's belief that his most recent story ["Higher Education"] dishonors their family and all Jewry as well…. Threatened like Stephen Dedalus with a choice between his father and his art, Zuckerman seeks solutions in fantasies that gradually supplant the main tale as they grow increasingly desperate, elaborate, and ridiculous. All these conflicts portray the artist as a comic victim of his own obsessions, yet the narration sustains a larger context. Recounting his visit to the master from a distance of twenty years, Zuckerman finds unexpected lessons in the traumas of his youth: the differences between fantasy and realism, the roles of the imagination in art and life, the relation between the artist and his art.

Not surprisingly, the explicit contrast between realism and fantasy proves the least satisfying of these themes, for Roth's own commitment to realism makes the contrast appear self-serving. (pp. 46-7)

As narrator, Zuckerman may of course expose his character through a bias toward realism. But correspondences between him and his creator confuse matters, suggesting not only that realistic writers do indeed lack imagination, but also that they have no responsibility for material that they borrow from life…. [The] similarities between Roth and Zuckerman … imply that the author has in fact spoken for himself through his personas all along. The contradiction is unsettling and disappointing.

But it is also something of a trap that Roth has set for the reader determined to equate realistic stories and real life…. Lonoff has much in common with Bernard Malamud; yet as Zuckerman describes the master's tales and family feuds, Lonoff could just as well be modeled on I. B. Singer or Leo Tolstoy. Similarly, rumor holds that Felix Abravanel, an affected and egotistical writer whom Zuckerman abandoned as a potential master, stands for Saul Bellow—but what about Norman Mailer? And Lonoff's former student Amy Bellette: "Where [have we] seen that severe dark beauty before?" Of course. She's Anne Frank.

Attempts to identify literature with life lead to absurdity, and the distinction between them stands at the center of the novel. Doc Zuckerman, certain that gentile readers will find renewed cause for anti-Semitism in the greedy Jews of "Higher Education," cannot grasp that his son is its author: "You are a loving boy … You are not somebody who writes this kind of story and then pretends it's the truth."… The father does not understand that every literary work has a ghost writer. Most of the characters in The Ghost Writer write; and every one, when compared to the persona of his work, gives "the overall impression of being somebody's stand-in."… Zuckerman's stories show a similar disjunction between author and persona. No wonder he fancies that Amy Bellette, the mysterious beauty with a "fetching" accent, is really that most famous of all Jewish writers, Anne Frank. (pp. 47-8)

The reconstruction of Anne Frank's transformation into ghost writer Amy Bellette stands without introduction or conclusion identifying it as the product of Zuckerman's imagination. The very end of the novel does reveal that the tale belongs to fantasy rather than to reality, but roughly half of the novel allows—indeed, encourages—us to believe that Anne Frank, mistakenly listed among the dead, did in fact manage to survive the war, remain undiscovered by her father, and immigrate to America through a series of credible and not entirely unlikely events.

Roth's fiction thrives on such confusions between the real and the imagined, challenging what he once called "the official version of reality" and celebrating the incongruities that result….

This technique links Roth with the classic southwestern humorists, whose tall tales also mix outrageous fantasy with meticulous realism and also dupe their audiences (temporarily, at least) into accepting the impossible as true. Neither the tall tale nor the Roth story explicitly identifies the limits of fantasy, but where the tall tale slips quietly into fantasy and thereby promotes willing suspension of disbelief, the Roth tale asserts the incredible outright and proceeds to coerce belief. Thus Zuckerman's tale of Anne Frank quickly announces that Amy is Anne and then moves back to supply plausible explanations to every objection that a reader might make…. (p. 49)

Just as realistic detail supports The Ghost Writer's fantasies, so imagination sustains its realism. Lying well beneath a polished surface, the novel's artifice invites, as it frustrates, efforts to identify the characters as real people…. For his part, Zuckerman exemplifies the nervous youth desperate for approval and success. Maturity has diminished his seriousness about himself, but not the intensity of his feelings…. More important, both to Zuckerman's realistic quality and to the novel's themes, the young writer has a virtuoso imagination. Not the only evidence of his creativity, Zuckerman's three fantasies about Amy Bellette are the most telling. Each attempts to resolve the conflict between Zuckerman and his father, who wants his son to disavow "Higher Education" and express a more conventional Jewish consciousness in his work. Rejecting such demands, the youth wishes to remain loyal to his art yet regain his father's approval. All variations on this theme, the three fantasies give form to the novel as it diverges from the Jamesian structure of the visit to Lonoff, and they finally provide the lesson that the master cannot.

It is a lesson born of failure. The fantasies grow more extravagant and ridiculous as they make increasing concessions to reality, yet they produce only realism: life does not imitate art. Without form and facts, however, the imagination cannot function. (pp. 50-1)

[The] fantasy fails utterly as a solution to the problem. Despite the evidence of Amy's looks and age, despite his own "unchallengeable" explanation, Zuckerman needs her cooperation. She must abandon the persona that protects her art. A reluctant but committed ghost writer, Anne Frank would not; a college librarian, Amy Bellette cannot. Zuckerman yields. Reality does not conform to the demands of fantasy.

Futile as substitutes for reality, Zuckerman's fantasies nonetheless remain useful fictions. They force him to accept the consequences of his art and his proper role as ghost writer. But they also reveal that realism and fantasy depend on each other. Fantasy stands at the center of Zuckerman's realistic narrative, the tale of his visit to the master's home. And that story, like the fantasy of Anne Frank, takes its shape from art—not from life or from pure imagination, but from literature itself.

The product of his own middle years, The Ghost Writer shows Philip Roth at his best. The hand is the hand of Henry James. The voice is the voice of Roth. (pp. 51-2)