Philip Roth from conversation to Fiction in EXIT GHOST

    As I mentioned in my current column, I have been trying to catch up on the stack of last year’s books that I should have and wanted to read but just never got around to.

    As past of that syllabus, I recently embarked on Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost.

    I was reading along, enjoying the book, impressed as always by Roth’s observations and abilities to narrate them, when I came across this paragraph, spoken by the character Amy Bellette.

    “…When Primo Levi Killed himself everyone said it was because of his having been an inmate of Auschwitz. I thought it was because of his writing about Auschwitz, the labor of the last book, contemplating that horror with all that clarity. Getting up every morning to write that book would have killed anyone.”
    She was speaking of Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved.  “

    I was stunned because Roth had once said that to me. Not that I was the only one he said it to — I’m sure it was an opinion that he tried out on several people. But I’m not sure if I have ever been party to a conversation that I then read in the mouth of a character. It is worth noting that Roth chose not the Philip Roth character (his alter ego Zuckerman) but another, to say it.

    And here’s the strange thing. When Roth said it, it had impressed me, and stayed with me. So much so that I had worked it in to something I was writing.

    In my piece (unpublished fiction) the lead character says the following:
   

 â€œThe
Drowned and the Saved,” Levi’s last book is possibly the best – the truest
book ever written about the Holocaust.” 
Fischer said. “One writer said that he understood why Levi killed
himself: after writing such a book, there was nothing left to say.”

  Perhaps I should now change it to “Philip Roth once said……”

    This is all the more ironic, and all the more interesting because “Exit Ghost” concerns itself with separating what a writer uses from real life, from how he uses and what it becomes in fiction.

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