This is the last of nine novels in which the character of Zuckerman has served as Roth’s alter ego, elaborating in the first person on aspects of a life and career very much like the author’s own. But the most one can say is that in this case the endgame comes none too soon for Soul in this book is simply not singing nearly loud enough to redeem the tattered coat that is its protagonist Nathan Zuckerman. His new novel, Exit Ghost, is about a man aging in more ways than one and trying to sing himself back into the flow of life. Philip Roth used another phrase in Yeats’s great poem as the title of his novel The Dying Animal (2001). "An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick,” wrote William Butler Yeats in “Sailing to Byzantium.” Unless, Yeats added, “Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing/For every tatter in its mortal dress.”
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