Philip Roth gets Darker?

Readers of Leaving a Doll's House (1996) by British actress Claire Bloom, a chilling memoir largely devoted to her long relationship with Philip Roth, come to his fictions and habits of depicting women only with great trepidation.
Bloom's time with Roth lasted 19 years, the final three as his wife. In Leaving a Doll's House, Bloom described Roth as a depressed, manipulative, at times mentally ill seducer of women, who surreptitiously recorded her and others' telephone calls, lied to her about assignations, and swung between acts of brutal cruelty, pleas for mothering, and coldhearted exploitation of anyone who did not defer to him as a high priest of art.
Stop, you might say. What does this have to do with Exit Ghost, promoted as the ninth of Roth's novels involving Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's now-71-year-old alter ego whose accumulated experiences over those books reflect many, though not all, of Roth's own?
A lot.
Bloom remains the only person close to Roth who has defied, in print, his fierce attempts to control information about his private life. She makes the point repeatedly in her memoir that while Roth reflexively savages critics ("the lice of literature") for ineptly reading his books as if they're more autobiographical than imaginative, those critics are often right. Roth's real mental breakdown, on which he based part of Operation Shylock, was, she writes, "just as he recorded it." A diatribe she hurled at him over living with a writer in the country appeared "almost verbatim" in The Ghost Writer. His evisceration of his first wife in My Life as a Man counts as a notorious landmark in literary misogyny.
The connection matters because Exit Ghost yet again revolves around a handful of familiar Roth themes and characters: the link between the novel and real life; the desire of an older Jewish writer for a beautiful, decades-younger woman; how almost everyone but Zuckerman is a fool or poseur. Yet contrary to Zuckerman's announcement late in Exit Ghost that "A novel is not evidence, a novel's a novel," a Roth novel is evidence of the mind behind it, and observing Philip Roth's angry, self-indulgent mind gets sadder by the decade.
Remember how David Copperfield asks whether he will be the hero of his own tale? Roth and his doppelgangers never need to ask. They always are.
Exit Ghost begins with an unpretty picture of Zuckerman at 71, one that might win sympathy if not for his boundless egotism. Since his operation for prostate cancer nine years before, Zuckerman has been incontinent and impotent, a professor of diapers engaged in Operation Self-Pity, having secluded himself at his remote cabin in the Connecticut woods. He's also getting forgetful.
He decides to try a surgical procedure in Manhattan that might eliminate his incontinence. For the first time in 11 years, Zuckerman heads to New York for a stay. In more than a week living out of a midtown hotel room, the world he has shut out upsets his routines and awakens possibilities.
Cruising the ads in the New York Review of Books, he spots one by a young married literary couple, Billy Davidoff (from Philadelphia) and Jamie Logan (from Houston), seeking to exchange their West Side apartment for a country place. After one meeting, he falls for Jamie and wants to bed her - even though he knows he can't perform.
Meanwhile, at a downscale luncheonette, he spots a deteriorated 75-year-old Amy Bellette - the young woman he'd encountered in 1956 at the house of E.I. Lonoff, the older short-story writer Zuckerman admired. She's had brain surgery and is being pestered by Richard Kliman, an aggressive, Harvard-educated, literary journalist. Kliman wants to write a biography of the long-forgotten Lonoff that will reveal a past sexual scandal, but also bring him to public attention again.
The plot thickens because Kliman was Jamie's college boyfriend. And Zuckerman once desired Amy as he now desires Jamie. Because he wants to keep seeing Jamie, Zuckerman goes for the home-swap deal despite his better judgment. He also starts writing a dialogue, He and She, in which he imagines conversations between him and Jamie that will lead to her leaving Billy for life with him.
In The Dying Animal (2001), another of Roth's veteran alter egos, David Kepesh, underwent a similar late-life infatuation. A snowy-haired cultural critic over 60, Kepesh found himself sexually unhinged by student Consuela Castillo, the beautiful daughter of Cuban exiles - who naturally showed interest.
You'd call it a pattern if it were not, across the broad scope of Roth's oeuvre, far more - a pathetic mosaic. In Exit Ghost, as in The Dying Animal, the falsest notes Roth hits are in orchestrating the young woman's psychology and dialogue, preposterously portraying her mounting interest in the older man. If you read the new book, note how many times we're told in He and She that Jamie laughed at a Zuckerman comment. Ask yourself if someone in her situation would.
How, hypothetically, would one review Exit Ghost if it were a first novel by an unknown? Conversational and readable, cliched in its larger plot, lacking fresh imagery or arresting wordplay, and unconvincing in the judgments it tries to shove down the reader's throat: that Kliman is a "domineering" jerk, that Jamie doesn't know what she wants in a man, that Amy remained satisfied with just four years of Lonoff because she'd had the privilege of being "in love with a great man."
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.
Even in Zuckerman's contrived conversations with Jamie, he's hard-pressed to come up with any reason for his infatuation and browbeating of her except that she's got large breasts on a slim frame. Remember another of Roth's immortal short novels, The Breast (1972)? Some kids never grow up.
Similarly, the furious Bush-bashing through alternate mouths (could Roth be taping Paul Krugman?), and the vituperation toward the young (also seen in The Human Stain), whether for using cell phones or not agreeing with Zuckerman-like figures enough, is telling, especially since we know from Bloom that Roth is a man subject to rages. Kliman, at one point, rebukes Zuckerman: "Look, old men hate young men. That goes without saying."
Well, some old men. Zuckerman.
An air of smug self-regard, of "I'm-a-great-artist-and-you're not" preening, of paeans to his own "writing books and studying once again, for a final go-round, the first great writers I read," permeate Zuckerman/Roth's voice, though, to Roth's credit, he does allow Jamie more counterstrikes (in Zuckerman's imaginary dialogue) than he usually permits secondary characters.
That's OK because, of course, we're supposed to think, "Zuckerman is not Roth."
Well, embrace that view if you like. Certainly do so if you have a Ph.D. oral coming up. But here's a real-world tip: Nathan Zuckerman does not exist, except on the page.
Roth loves to pre-empt this view, and as puppetmaster tries to in almost every novel. "They think they know everything each time I publish a book," Zuckerman says in his imagined dialogue here, referring to inept readers who confuse fiction with autobiography.
"Those are the idiots," replies pliant Jamie. "You're a mystery."
Not to those of us who have been reading you - and about you - for decades, Mr. Roth.