"You don't like him much."
"I'm not in the business. 'Liking people' is often just another racket."
An aspiring writer in 1950s New York scores a meeting with his idol, novelist E.I. Lonoff, in Philip Roth's "The Ghost Writer." A bottle episode quickly turns into an occasionally confusing, often-humorous tale that includes marital strife, anti-Semitism, the process of earning attention as a writer, and, well, Anne Frank.
"I got fondled more by strangers on the rush-hour subway during two months in 1935 than I have up here in the last twenty years!"
Amidst it all, young Nathan Zuckerman struggles with his own identity even as he finally meets his hero, questioning himself incessantly: Is he a good Jew? Is he a bad person? What does his owe his family? How does he honor his past without compromising his future?
Written in 1979 as the first of what would become a trilogy, "The Ghost Writer" features rigorous pacing that outweighs any challenges in following what is real and what isn't, cementing Roth yet again as an essential novelist.
"As even the judge knew, literary history was in part the history of novelists infuriating fellow countrymen, family, and friends ... writer weren't writers, I told myself, if they didn't have the strength to face the insolubility of that conflict and go on."
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