The ghost of Philip Roth

I WAS just about to remark (honest) on the question of whose departing shade it was that inspired the title of Philip Roth's latest novel, "Exit Ghost", when I see that William Skidelsky of Prospect has got there several days before me. He too has noticed that, whereas Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic assumes the title to be taken from a stage direction in "Hamlet" (the ghost being that of Hamlet's father), Hermione Lee, in the current New Yorker, says it is taken from a stage direction in "Macbeth" (the ghost being Banquo's). And, since Lee gives her gloss in the course of an interview with Roth, and since Roth seems to accept it, that apparently settles the matter, at least as far as authorial intent goes.

Not that it makes a deal of difference. As best as I can tell, Roth has borrowed the phrase as a rhetorical flourish, not because he particularly wants us to interpret his convoluted plot in the light of "Hamlet" (where the ghost of Hamlet's father is a spur to action) or of "Macbeth" (where the ghost of Banquo externalises Macbeth's guilty conscience).

The critics, meanwhile, are taking their cue from "Julius Caesar". To judge from Hitchens's notice ...

one gets an ever-stronger impression that Roth has degraded the
Eros-Thanatos dialectic of some of his earlier work and is now using
his fiction, first to kill off certain characters and to shoot the
wounded, and second to give himself something to masturbate about

... and from another zinger, by Carlin Romano, in the Philadelphia Inquirer ...

As the umpteenth recycling of Roth's obsessions, Exit Ghost
will doubtless draw Roth admirers to explore and celebrate it,
connecting all the new dots to previous Zuckerman lore as if they were
painting a portrait of literature itself. Less enamored readers may
conclude that to the extent Roth possesses an imagination, it's an
insufferable one

... they come, on this occasion, to bury Roth, not to praise him.

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