Exit Ghost
By Philip Roth
Jonathan Cape £16.99, 292 pages
FT bookshop price: £13.59

No matter which name Philip Roth chooses for his narrators or fictional alter egos, whether it is Nathan Zuckerman, David Kepesh or indeed even, slyly, Philip Roth, they invariably share many of the same urgent preoccupations: the tyranny of sexual desire, the essential incomprehensibility of women, the question of Jewish identity and self-positioning, literary ambition. In other words, they are all recognisably the same man: “Roth Man”, as Martin Amis once called him. Roth Man has long been defined by his egoism, his limitless ambition, his aggressive and relentless sexual energy, his scabrous wit and irony, and his rage.