Lonoff, brilliant writer and austere recluse, is the object of a literary pilgrimage by Nathan Zuckerman, the central character of [The Ghost Writer]. Zuckerman is a writer too: 23 years old, four stories in print, and on the make in both senses of that phrase. (p. 1)

As an original for Zuckerman, we are likely indeed to think of Roth himself near the start of his career. The central issue of this novel has as its seed an unpublished story of Zuckerman's that upsets his parents extremely: a treatment of a Zuckerman family scandal, in which Zuckermans—therefore Jews—are revealed as adulterous, violent and greedy…. The distress of Zuckerman's elders recalls that which greeted "Epstein," Roth's own early story about an adulterous Jew.

But the issue goes far beyond whether or not Zuckerman's story should be published. As he comes to realize in the course of the novel, he...