Exit Ghost is just too fascinating to leave alone…this book is latter-day Roth at his intricately thoughtful best…
—The New York Times Book Review

This being Philip Roth, Exit Ghost manages some occasional laughter in the dark…and, again, this being Philip Roth, the novel is sometimes brutally sexual (the description of Jamie's past, whether imagined or actual). Above all, though, the book shows us a man trying to work with the cards that fate has dealt him—and to accommodate himself to the diminution of his mental and physical powers. In this struggle, any of us can see our own destinies, whether we are "no-longers" or "not-yets." As Leon Trotsky, no less, said with simple truth: "Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that happen to a man."
—The Washington Post

Mr. Roth has created a melancholy, if occasionally funny, meditation on aging, mortality, loneliness and the losses that come with the passage of time…Compared with Mr. Roth's big postwar trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist and The Human Stain), which unfolded into a bold chronicle of American innocence and disillusionment, this volume is definitely a modest undertaking, but it has a sense of heartfelt emotion lacking in Everyman and Dying Animal, and for fans of the Zuckerman books, it provides a poignant coda to Nathan's story, putting a punctuation point to his journey from youthful idealism and passion through midlife confusion and angst toward elderly renunciation.
—The New York Times

Philip Roth's 28th book is, it seems, the final novel in the Zuckerman series, which began in 1979 with The Ghostwriter. A 71-year-old Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York after more than a decade in rural New England, ostensibly to see a doctor about a prostate condition that has left him incontinent and probably impotent. But Zuckerman being Zuckerman and Roth being Roth, the plot is much more complicated than it at first appears. Within a few days of arriving in New York, Zuckerman accidentally encounters Amy Bellette, the woman who was once the muse/wife of his beloved idol, writer S.I. Lonoff; he also meets a young novelist and promptly begins fantasizing about the writer's young and beautiful wife. There's also a subplot about a would-be Lonoff biographer, who enrages Zuckerman with his brashness and ambition, two qualities a faithful Roth reader can't help ascribing to the young, sycophantic Zuckerman himself. As usual, Roth's voice is wise and full of rueful wit, but the plot is contrived (the accidental meeting with Amy, for example, is particularly unbelievable) and the tone hovers dangerously close to pathetic. In the Rothian pantheon, this one lives closer to The Dying Animalthan Everyman. (Oct.)

In Roth's ninth installment in the Zuckerman saga, the reclusive author leaves his mountain retreat in the Berkshires to return to New York City for a promising new treatment for incontinence, a lingering reminder of his battle with prostate cancer. Almost immediately, Zuckerman is contacted by Richard Kliman, a brash young journalist who is working on a biography of the long-forgotten writer E.I. Lonoff, one of Zuckerman's mentors and the subject of Roth's first (and best) Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer(1979). Scandalous new details have emerged about Lonoff's sex life, and Kliman wants to break the story. Zuckerman resents Kliman's Zuckerman-like ambition, and argues heatedly that Lonoff's literary work is the only thing that matters. His private life is off limits. Meanwhile, Zuckerman becomes obsessed with a beautiful, wealthy young Texan and imagines an elaborate seduction, which he is simply too old and too sick to put into effect. While not one of Roth's strongest works, this novel has all the elements: unreliable narrators, authorial games, meditations on the use and abuse of literature, and a firm grounding in the reality of post-9/11 New York. Recommended for most fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, LJ6/15/07.]
—Edward B. St. John

Zuckerman may die. Roth will die. Readers will die. Literature lives on.
Kirkus Reviews

As usual, Roth's voice is wise and full of rueful wit...
Publishers Weekly

...agonizingly real yet gorgeously rendered...
Booklist, ALA, Starred Review —

Intricate, artful, and pressing.”

Agonizingly real yet gorgeously rendered.”

EXIT GHOST is purportedly the final installment in the saga of Nathan Zuckerman, the fictional alter ego of Philip Roth. In this novel, Zuckerman returns to New York City, where he encounters a woman from his past, an overzealous biographer, and a much younger woman who leads him into tortured temptation. The accent that George Guidall gives to this young woman, a Texan, is oddly consistent, but that is the only quibble with his performance. Of the many qualities that make him one of the best narrators in the business is his facility with the voices of female characters. He manages to make them sound feminine without overdoing the higher pitches. D.B. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine