Who is the ghost writer in Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer? In this nouvelle of guilt about anti-Semitism, the ghost seems to be that of Anne Frank. Roth speaks of her as a "Jewish ghost," and writes of Anne's "seething passion to come back as an avenging ghost!" But Amy Bellette's delusion that she is Anne Frank rediviva cannot sustain the imaginative load the ghost writer carries. It is the madness of art, not the madness of Amy, that is required, so the ghost reveals itself finally as Henry James himself, a ghost that does the writing of the book.

Philip Roth invokes James by his quotations from and continual reference to the latter's short story, "The Middle Years." By a literary sleight of hand, however, he conceals another Jamesian story, "The Author of Beltraffio," for the main line of the plot of that long tale is the...