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Fiction as Faith: Philip Roth’s Testament in Exit Ghost

Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost (2007) provides a fitting coda to the saga of the novelist’s alter-ego and writer-protagonist Nathan Zuckerman, whose novelistic obsessions, cunning, manic discipline, and articles of faith are the stuff of literary legend. Battling the aftermath of prostate cancer in impotence and incontinence, Zuckerman encounters the aggressive Richard Kliman, a young cultural journalist intent on authoring an exposé of a biography on E. I. Lonoff. In defending Lonoff, Zuckerman, rendered ghost-like by old age, defends the literary vocation against literal-minded biographers by arguing that the biographical impulse unmediated by ethical concerns desacralizes fictional truths mediated through imagination. The essay examines Zuckerman’s spirited defense of the “fiction-making impulse” and his quarrels with the genre of contemporary biography vis-à-vis the larger debates on the vexed relationship between fictional representation and reality.