For Mickey Sabbath, there is a constant veering between what he calls “the fantasy of endlessness” and “the fact of finitude.” Roth’s work since then has returned again and again to these two gates of being, one ever open and one ever closing. “Late Roth” sounds a little like “late monopoly capitalism”-neither shows much evidence of frailty-yet one can now see that a phase of work opened with his great, wild novel “Sabbath’s Theater” (1995), in which the struggle between the vitality of sex and the fatality of the body was newly acute. Partly to shut out the evidence of this decay, Zuckerman has been in rural seclusion in the Berkshires for the past eleven years, without the company of television or the Internet. He is seventy-one, the same age at which the hero of “Everyman” dies, and the two novels may be taken as a single report on the undistinguished thing-the bafflement of the body as it is slowly ambushed in broad daylight by what it always knew but would never admit was coming. Nathan Zuckerman, the narrator of Roth’s new novel, “Exit Ghost” (Houghton Mifflin $26), is incontinent and, above all, impotent, twin results of prostate cancer. He starts a foolishly flirtatious conversation with one of them, who then changes her route and never returns, “thereby thwarting his longing for the last great outburst of everything.” The elderly nameless protagonist of “Everyman,” Roth’s previous novel, weakened by heart surgery, watches young women jogging along a New Jersey boardwalk, aware of the absurd disparity between his waxing mind and his waning body.
The aging David Kepesh, in “The Dying Animal,” makes the mistake of growing infatuated with one of his many young conquests, and becomes the toy of her youthful sexual mastery.
Their minds are ripe with sexual energy, with transgressive vitality, but their bodies are sour with decline. KITAJ, “SIDES” (1979)/COURTESY MARLBOROUGH GALLERYīefore his death, Jonathan Swift pointed to a blighted tree and said to a friend, “I shall be like that tree I shall die first at the top.” Philip Roth’s dying animals, at loose in the twilit carnival of his late work, reverse Swift’s prophecy: they fear they will die from the bottom up.
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