The Ghost Writer

"The Ghost Writer is a wonderful book for many reasons. It’s about big issues—about vocation, about literature and about the Holocaust. It’s sophisticated with overtones of Henry James , Chekhov , and Turgenev . It explores the nature of emotional relationships, here between the aging novelist E.I. Lonoff and his wife, Hope. It explores history through the character of Amy Bellette, who may, according to the narrator Zuckerman, be Anne Frank. Portnoy’s Complaint , 1969, was over-the-top. But by The Ghost Writer , 1979, he was more restrained. Roth wrote 31 books, but The Ghost Writer is the one that is most carefully structured. Roth gets the mechanics of storytelling and the tone right. He had a great editor, Veronica Geng, who was at The New Yorker ; she polished it with him. Roth broadened his perspective. His relationship with Claire Bloom, the English actress, led to him regularly spending six months of the year in London with her, where he met many new voices: Edna O’Brien, Primo Levi, Harold Pinter, Michael Herr, and the American painter R.B. Kitaj. Saul Bellow, whom he first encountered as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, was an early influence but in the seventies and after, it was Milan Kundera, Aharon Appelfeld, and others. He needed to get beyond Bellow and that’s what Europe helped him do. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . He also developed important connections with a whole series of other writers in the European phase of his career. Whereas American writers only had to worry about time, money and materials, these writers—whether in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary or later, in Russia—wrote under dire circumstances. In his wonderful collection, Shop Talk , Roth interviewed a whole series of non-American writers. Learning about the lives of these writers took Roth far from Newark. It went beyond his Jersey style."