Not Pynchon at all, hardly an overlapping theme; alike only in quality

[Mark Kohut]

*The Ghost Writer* by Philip Roth is one of the sublime short novels,
novella?---
a short story marketed as a novel, as Thomas said about* Lot 49!--*it WAS
published
in its entirety in *The New Yorker *first.

A marvelous extended parable, one might say, stretching 'parable' a bit, of
life and art, James's *Middle Years* alluded to
(the protagonist rereads it twice one night, the only night of the story,
during unexpected events)
and Roth's often turbulent prose is almost Chekhovian here, as soft as
whispering,
Jamesian, of course.

A story in which Roth takes on his Jewish community critics--his American
critics in general-- with a conceit of genius; a story in which
Kafka's axe is so quietly alluded to (I surely did not know the quote when
I first read *The Ghost Writer.*) This Roth
holds up and expands in my postmodern--in age only; It is NOT that at all,
at all--maturity; but I will confess here I was moved almost
to tears that first reading and now was moved to sublimated tears); a story
which i now know contains Malamud
and Bellow and a major part of Roth's relationship with Claire Bloom.

But no real spoilers here because I've read that true news story of the two
scientists forced to live and work together with
too few others for too long with no trips to get away and in which the guy
who would tell his colleague the endings
of books he was reading despite being asked to stop, got badly stabbed.

This would be another art-life story for a real writer to turn into art.