The not-yets and no-longers

Philip Roth's latest novel is a follow-up to his 1979 novella The Ghost Writer. After 11 years of living in isolation in the Berkshires, Nathan Zuckerman goes to New York for a medical visit a propos his incontinence problem. He soon realises that his reclusive oblivion in the Berkshires had secluded him to the point where he still had no idea what the World Wide Web was and thus was still living in "the age of the typewriter".

Zuckerman thus decides to swap his Berkshires home for an apartment in New York for a year and this is where a writing married couple, Jamie and Billy, still in their 30s, enter the picture. Zuckerman finds himself falling for Jamie and in his self-absorbed solipsism dreams that she would leave her husband for him, prostate surgery and all.

He also bumps into Amy Bellette, with whom E.I. Lonoff was having an affair in The Ghost Writer, and whom Zuckerman had imagined as being Anne Frank, the perfect future wife he could introduce to his parents and through her be reconciled with the Jewish community. Amy has lost all her beauty and is now an invalid recovering from brain surgery. The admiration Zuckerman felt for her in The Ghost Writer is transferred to Jamie, as Zuckerman turns his conversations with her into an imaginary dialogue entitled 'He' and 'She'- a dialogue which "was an aid to nothing, alleviated nothing, achieved nothing" but which "seemed necessary to write" The two women's storylines converge when Zuckerman starts being stalked by a young man, Kliman, who is Jamie's ex-boyfriend and who wants to write a biography on E.I. Lonoff, claiming that he has uncovered a secret about Lonoff's past that not even the writer's family were aware of.

Just like Alvin Pepler in Zuckerman Unbound and Moishe Pipik in Operation Shylock, Kliman is another annoying character who pesters Mr Roth's characters and whom Zuckerman detests as he sees him both as an unworthy rival for Jamie's affections and as a snake who wants to destroy Lonoff's reputation and push him off the literary pedestal.

After a long-distance encounter with Norman Mailer, Zuckerman realises that the world has been transformed into the "not-yets" (Kliman, Jamie and Billie) versus the "no-longers" (Zuckerman, Amy Bellette, E.I. Lonoff and Mailer). Like his 2006 novel Everyman, Exit Ghost deals with decrepitude, physical decay and loneliness.

Literature also plays its part - by reading Macbeth aloud to each other, Billie and Jamie discover a striking relevance to George W. Bush's first governance.

Hearing Lonoff's voice from the grave, Amy Bellette reveals to Zuckerman that he has let her know that "reading/writing people, we are finished, we are ghosts witnessing the end of a literary era".

• Ms Gatt has a Masters (taught) in English in modern and contemporary literature. Her dissertation focused on the works of Philip Roth.

• The review copy of this title is the reviewer's own.