1. Sex and the City: Urbanity and sexual energy in Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost
In his essay “Representing Terrorism: Reanimating Post-9/11 New York City”, Howie argues that
representing a visual New York in popular TV series such as Friends, or Sex and The City with the
Twin Towers created a dilemma for studios, because representing the now-missing Towers in an urban
skyline was to represent a missing city, a city that “in many respects,no longer existed” (2). In Philip
Roth’s Exit Ghost, Nathan Zuckerman makeshis return to the city in 2004, afteran 11-year exile. Inside
him comes reawakened,as phrased by Roth in an interview with Hermione Lee, “a longing so strong
that it comes to border on the delusion that he can recover what is irrevocably gone”. Roth defines the
ghost in the story as being Zuckerman’s youth, which he chases throughout the book in a “crazed hope
of rejuvenation” (31). I suggest that the ‘presence/absence’ of the Twin Towers also implicitly haunts
the text, representing a changed, remapped, emasculated landscape that Zuckerman refuses to
acknowledge, at odds with his new-found sexual, urbane energy. In “Geography, experience and
imagination: towards a geographical epistemology” Pile, quoting Lowenthal contends that “people
create personalgeographies which are 'separate personalworlds of experience,learning and imagination
[which] necessarily underlie any universe of discourse’” (12). Zuckerman’s personal, sexualized New
York - represented in his relationship with Richard Kliman and his fictionalized depiction of elusive
Jamie Logan - is destined to shatter because it cannot be reconciled with the real, fragile post-9/11 New
York he returns to. Likewise, the younger version of himself that Zuckerman hopes to recover can only
develop in a contained, fictional space he carves for himself within the city, but that is ultimately
doomed as he grows increasingly self-conscious of his own irretrievable loss of sexual energy.
Robert Park asserts that the city is a state of mind... it is a product of nature, and particularly of
human nature” (1). Following this statement,I examine how Zuckerman’s construction of a sexualized,
masculinized New York, based around his idealized fascination with Jamie and Kliman stems from his
own new-found energy, a production of a self/city interplay that plays out in his fiction. But ashe writes
the New York and flirtation with Jamie Logan he is too old to experience, his produced fiction and
sense of reality blur, leading him, I suggest, to misread the city’s own, physical text, marked by the
destruction of the towers. Zizek’s writings on post-9/11 landscape provide a useful framework to think
about the city and its inhabitants as being unwillingly ‘remapped’. Misread by Zuckerman, the city
ultimately resists Zuckerman’s appropriation of it.
Zuckerman’s first steps back into Manhattan are doubtful, tentative, as he questions where to
start, where situate his body in the city he once lived in. His first thoughts turn towards an imitation of
the past,a “revisiting” (14). Yet, fearful of the changes that might have taken place in his absence,that
the present might not lend itself to this ‘revisiting’, he heads towards Ground Zero instead, to “[b]egin
there, where the biggest thing of all occurred”. Yet,it the same sentence,at a semi-colon, he stops and
turns back on himself, making his way towards the “familiar rooms” of the Metropolitan Museum
instead (15). I will return later in more detail to the significance of his inability to visit Ground Zero,
here, I simply wish to introduce the idea that Zuckerman is first reluctant to begin in the place where
the present,the change from the past most obviously assertsitself in the city. Fearful, he anchors himself
in a landmark of ‘familiar’ past which offers the possibility to elude a destabilizing present. Yet, even
this present as an immutable conservation of the past offers no stability: returning to a restaurant he ate
at in the nineties, where nothing has changed, he feels like an “impostor” (27). Ivain contends that
within cities we move in a “closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us towards the past”
(qtd. In Pile, 14). Yetthat past for Zuckerman cannot be revisited satisfactorily, asit leads to a “craving”
to be the man he once was (27) - and whilst everything else is still on surface the same,he is not. In the
first sentence of the book, Zuckerman declares that during his exile, he has “long since killed” the
“impulse” to be a part of the present world (1). In the rurality of the Berkshires, and in his first steps
around New York, the rhythm of the text is steady, detached. However,in the restaurant, when he sees

2. the ad for a house-swapwhich would allow him to move back to NewYork, adrenaline suddenly infuses
the text, as he responds “[w]ithout waiting”, dialling “quickly”. When Billy responds, Zuckerman’s
speech is an indirect, uninterrupted, frenzied flow, reaching its climax as he tells him he can be there
“in minutes” (29). The possibility of re-inscribing himself on the urban maps fills Zuckerman with new-
found energy, which expresses itself in “crazed” hope for rejuvenation. The city becomes the source
and the manifestation of Zuckerman’s energy, where life appears “limitless” (31).
In this limitless space Zuckerman perceives, he sets out to remap his masculinity on the urban
grid. Along with his new-found energy comes a reawakening of his sexual desire in Jamie Logan’s
“sensual presence” (35), which he in turn integrates into his own, personal construction of the city as a
sexual space,as he notes that
women were clad in ways I couldn’t ignore, however much I wanted not to be aroused
by the very desires actively quelled through living in seclusion … I enviously
understood that women dressing as they did meant that they weren’t only to be looked
at and the provocative parade was merely the initial unveiling. (65)
In De Certeau’s terms,the walking of passers-by “offers a series of turns tours and detours that can be
compared to 'turns of phrase' or 'stylistic figures'. There is a rhetoric of walking. The arts of 'turning'
phrases finds an equivalent in art of composing a path” (161). Zuckerman’s attention to the sexuality
of the street becomes a text in itself: Zuckerman writes a sexualized city. In turn, this sexualized city
also becomes a virile, masculinized one in his relationship with Kliman.
There is a tension in Kliman’s position to Zuckerman, as he functions both as a double, a
‘younger self’ who Zuckerman notes is “a passing rendition of me at that age” (48) but also a rival,
Jamie’s ex-boyfriend. When they meet up to discuss Kliman’s project to write E. I. Lonoff’s biography,
Zuckerman constructs Kliman as the embodiment of his perceived masculine, energetic New York he
seeks to re-establish himself in, describing him as being “well over two hundred pounds, easily six-
three,a large, agile, imposing young man with a lot of dark hair and pale grey eyesthat were the wonder
that pale grey eyes are in the human animal” (96). Kliman exudes stereotypical male energy, which
Zuckerman sets out to resist, as a chance to reassert his own virility. In their encounter, Central Park
becomes an urban arena. When Zuckerman declines to participate in this project, Kliman “[searches]
for a reason not to punch [him] in the mouth for having failed to be bowled over by his eloquence”
(100). Although they both come to their feet, the fight physically takes place: instead, it becomes a
battle of wills, as Zuckerman tells Kliman that he will do “everything he can to sabotage [him]” (103).
Zuckerman perceives this rivalry as the key to his rejuvenation, as urbanity, sexuality, energy and
virility all intersect together in his mind:
There is pain of being in the world, but there is also robustness. When was the last time
I had felt the excitement of taking someone one? Let the intensity out! Let the
belligerence out! A resuscitating breathof the old contention luring me into the old role,
both Kliman and Jamie having the effect of rousing my virility in me again, the virility
of mind and spirit and desire and intention and wanting to be with people again and
have a fight again and have a woman again and feeling the pleasure of one’s power
again. (104)
Yet, in the text, Zuckerman’s desires never materialize themselves. He never fights Kliman,
nor seduces Jamie Logan. Rather, he channels this energy into writing. If De Certeau argues that
walking is writing, as it has its own rhetoric, in the text, Zuckerman ‘literally’ carves his own space in
the city: his writing becomes the medium through which he mostly attaches himself to the city, in his
fictionalized ‘HE/SHE’ dialogues. There is a shift away from the physical reality of the city and into
the fictional, as he performs mostly dialogues between himself and Jamie, creating a space where his

3. sexual frustration can be released,as it cannot be in the non-fictional space1
. The text is set during and
after the 2004 election, an emotional, highly-strung backdrop, which affects mostly Jamie in the text.
In his fictionalized depiction of her, her sexuality plays alongside her emotion over the elections, as he
writes in the introductory SITUATION to the dialogue that SHE’s “scared and distraught over the
election, over Al Qaeda,over an affair with a college boyfriend who’s around and still in love with her,
and over “daring ventures” of a kind she married to renounce” (123). Throughout the text, Zuckerman
acknowledges that Jamie is affected, exhausted by the current political situation, describing her as
“drained” after the election results (88). In Jamie’s character,Roth writes a husk of a woman, which
Zuckerman’s imagination fills with sexual intent, such aswhen he wonders why she had “gotten herself
up so appealingly” to watch the election results (83). In the act of writing Jamie, he creates an idealized
fiction of a woman that I would argue is to be read as too emotionally exhausted to care about sex.
Jamie’s sexual history in these dialogues are the product of his imagination. The fictionalized ‘SHE’
becomes his way of reclaiming his masculinity, as he performs her, ventriloquizes her in service of his
ego. In his text, she can restore his sexual attraction, as he makes her tell him that it excites her to be
alone with him too as they could “both use a little excitement” (132), and also reassert his masculine
power: “SHE: (Long pause) I’m a little afraid of you” (214).
If Zuckerman flirts with Jamie in this fictional space,and uses her voice to reassert himself, he
never crosses the boundary of physical contact, arguably aware that even inside his own fiction, he is
subject to his own physical limitations. He represents himself as shunning this physical contact with
her, leaving before following his inclination to kiss her (143), and progressively, he turns their relations
away from the carnal and into the intellectual. Strikingly, in the text, when he does perform an
aggressive, sexual encounter between HE and SHE, he surrenders the role of HE to Kliman, whom
throughout the text he supposes to be Jamie’s lover. His fictionalized depiction of their sex life is
explicit, as he imagines violent, sexual games between the two: “call girl and client” and “Jamie being
taken by force” (259). In ‘A Cup of Decaf Reality’, Zizek makes the case for adopted identities in a
virtual world being a reflection of our ‘true selves’, a space where the truth about ourselves can be
articulated. Following this reading, I would suggest that whilst Zuckerman’s desire to (violently)
overpower Jamie is evident, the fact that he must adopt a ‘mask’ of Kliman (rather than perform it
himself) sees him mentally give in to Kliman’s masculine, sexual power. In his fiction, Zuckerman
turns towards his ‘learnedness’,his mental superiority, as a means of gently seducing Jamie. He creates
the figure of a professor-lover to illustrate her attraction to knowledge, who she ‘tells’ him: “opened up
a world of thought that I had no idea existed… I was still a girl, only a girl, and I had no idea it was
sexual feeling” (236). If Zuckerman asserts that he is able to keep fiction and reality separate, that “the
imaginary “She” vividly at the middle of her character as the actual“she” will never be” (147), fiction
and reality begin to blur in his mind. Throughout the novel, her affair with Kliman begins as a
supposition in disguise, as he sees Kliman as a “boyfriend at college and with whom (I could imagine
all too easily) the link had remained sexual even after her marriage” (108). The brackets surrounding ‘I
could imagine all too easily’ speak for themselves, as a sentence is “grammatically complete without
[them]” (OED, “parenthesis”). Zuckerman’s imagination is redundant in the ‘truth’ of the affair. This
is later on consolidated in his mind, as after Jamie lies to Billy that Zuckerman wanted to look around
the apartment again, he thinks to himself “Yes,Kliman was the lover. She was so used to lying to Billy
– to cover her tracks with Kliman – that she’d lied to him now about me” (122)
Following my analysis, the New York that Zuckerman constructs first in the novel, and then
his own fiction is a sexual space,a masculine space,a space where the emotional drain of the threatening
political landscape is counteracted with a sexual tension, energy. I would like to make the case for this
city constructed by Zuckerman as being a ‘misreading’ of the city’s own text, written in the prolonged
aftermath of 9/11. As I mentioned at the beginning of my essay,Zuckerman turns round before visiting
Ground Zero. Throughout the novel, he never makes the trip, never acknowledges their disappearance.
1 I of coursemean non-fictional as confined to the physical world Zuckerman inhabitsin the novel.

4. Yet, they are present in their absence, present in Jamie Logan’s hysteria about moving out of the city,
in the elections, throughout the whole city Zuckerman returns to where ‘everything [is] simultaneously
familiar and unrecognizable’ (30). In The City and the Body, Pile discusses the phallic nature of the
Manhattan skyline: although on the whole hesitant to deconstruct skyscrapers and buildings as entirely,
and reductively phallic, he does howeverconcede that the Manhattan skyline is “open to psychoanalytic
readings precisely because it cloaks, exhibits and performs desire and power, through a political
economy of dominant visual and phallic spatialities” (224). Pile’s work was published in 1997 – to read
the text post-9/11, where the Manhattan skyline performs desire through a political economy of phallic
spatialities is interesting, although problematic, because it lends itself to a rather easy psychoanalytical
reading: did the fall of the Towers,and the subsequent ‘holes’ in the skyline create a castration anxiety
in the American psyche ? If this reading is a rather unsubtle one, it is, I think, a useful one for thinking
about Zuckerman’s refusalto visit Ground Zero: a sexualisation of a castrated city is more difficult, and
doesn’t offer the same possibilities for an urban sexual rejuvenation.
In more general terms of power, Ground Zero also acts as a stain, or a hole in the Manhattan
map. Reynolds and Fitzpatrick have argued that “maps, with their tacit specializations, attempt to
definitely mark out ‘what one can do in […] and make out of’ a space; that is, they direct how one
perceives and performs in space” (Reynolds and Fitzpatrick 72 in Zeikowitz 3). In the events of 9/11,
the attack on the Towers signifies an unwilling reconfiguration of the cityscape, this loss of power in
place that contains the city within such maps; in Zizek’s words, “the anamorphic stain which
denaturalized the idyllic well-known New York landscape” (15). Zizek further argues that it is the
“ultimate irony that ‘prior to the US bombing, the whole of Kabul already looked like downtown
Manhattan after September 11” (35). The Manhattan landscape has been unalterably ‘Othered’ in the
text: Zuckerman, in his failure to visit Ground Zero cannot see that New York is struggling to remap
itself against this loss of power and identity. Tony’s comment that “After 9/11 some of our regulars,
they took their kids and they moved to Long Island, they moved upstate,they moved to Vermont – they
moved all over, they went everywhere” (157) falls on deaf ears in the text. Zuckerman doesn’t see, or
refuses to see,the remapping of the city he once knew so well and that he sees as holding the key to his
search of lost time. When he narrates Jamie’s desire to leave the city, it is inherently sexual: “SHE: I
won’t have men, I won’t have people, I won’t have parties […] I won’t be so frayed, hopefully” (212).
He both misreads her ‘frayedness’ as a sexual, social one, rather than a frayedness of her own map, her
own familiarity amongst a city, and her own feeling of safety in a threatening political landscape, but
more widely, in this, he misreads the “state of mind”, as phrased by Pile, of the city (2).
Jamie, however,resists being made into a text by Zuckerman. In their final conversation at the
end of the novel, she tells him that Kliman is not her lover, and that she would have nothing to do with
him sexually should be “abundantly clear” by now, as she concludes “You’ve imagined a woman who
isn’t me” (277). His loss of rationality, his sense of disorientation is evident at the end of the novel.
From a venture which provided him with hope of rejuvenation, the city becomes a “frenzy”, a madness,
in which he can no longer partake (274). The reality of the city’s post-9/11 landscape and mentality is
in disjunction with his own produced city, which offers only frustrated hopes and desires, and a sense
of being out of place,and out of time, ashe fails to connect with the physical city’s underlying discourse.
Even in his own fiction, his carved place in the city is destined to falter, as Zuckerman, self-conscious
of his own failure in the city ventriloquizes SHE astalking to a “virtually inhumanly disciplined, rational
person who has lost all sense of proportion and entered into a desperate story of unreasonable wishes”
(291). Ashe tantalizes himself with the Jamie’s acceptance toenter an affairwith him, he “disintegrates”
(292), leaving behind, in the city, the exhausted urbane energy that cannot bring itself to the bed.