If Philip Roth were a moviemaker rather than a novelist, his Zuckerman franchise would now be well into its straight-to-video, 3 a.m.-on-TBS period. "Exit Ghost" is the ninth (October 12, 2007 03:58 AM EDT) of Roth's books to feature his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. "Jaws" was retired after a relatively dignified four outings. Chucky, even counting his wives/offspring, has only given us five. Zuckerman, though, has been with us just shy of thirty years - we've known him from ingénue to incontinence.

The good news: "Exit Ghost" is no "Bride of Chucky."

The less good news: it's no "American Pastoral" either.

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MO' MONEY, MO' PROBLEMS

We first meet Zuckerman in "The Ghost Writer" (1979), when he's an earnest 23-year-old with a handful of short stories to his name and an A-student's ambition to win the respect of his literary elders.

The rest of the series - its early installments, anyway - follow Zuckerman as he does win grudging respect, along with money and such fame that he can no longer walk down the street without being accosted by wild-eyed fans. The main action of those books is fame's curdling.

In "Zuckerman Unbound" (1981) he's gleefully buying whole racks of custom-made suits; by the end of "The Anatomy Lesson" (1983) he's deranged with painkillers and scheming frantically to make a living doing something, anything, other than writing autobiographical books.

Roth conveys Zuckerman's suffocation maybe too well. Reading these novels you find yourself wincing, sweating, as desperate to read another sort of book as Zuckerman is to write one.

Which is why the next installments come as such a relief.

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HELLO, WORLD!

Starting with "The Counterlife" (1988), and carrying on through a prize-laden trio beginning with "American Pastoral" (1997), Roth throws open the windows and lets in life.

Suddenly we get Israel in all its chaotic colors. We get vivid looks at people making their livings as glove-makers, dentists and teachers - anything, in other words, but writers. We get other people, and other stories, by the cart-load.

In these books Zuckerman has retreated alone to the woods of Connecticut and become not much more than a recording angel, taking the lives of his neighbors and friends and turning them into literature. The chaos of self has burned away, and all that remains is a set of sense organs, quivering away in the corner of the room.

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ZUCKERMAN REDUX

Zuckerman's return to the center of things, then, is a homecoming many readers will greet dubiously.

Zuckerman is 71 in "Exit Ghost," and a friend's suicide, along with a rush of grief for his departed potency, impels him to return to the city he once fled. He has "no idea what the World Wide Web is," he doesn't go to dinner parties or movies, he doesn't vote - he's an Unfrozen Caveman Novelist, and we sit forward greedily to witness his collision with the jumble of 2004 Manhattan.

The sparks don't materialize. Roth has always been an inspired urban cataloger, from Newark to Jerusalem, but here we get just stale scraps on New York's uneasiness about terrorism, a few arguments about Bush and Kerry, notes on the ubiquity of cell phones. Zuckerman's too busy being assaulted by his past to pay much attention to the surface of the present.

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WRAP A BLANKET AROUND IT

That past comes mostly from "The Ghost Writer." In a clever but implausible bit of architecture, Zuckerman runs into the girl who bewitched him way back in his 20s, now a dying and addled old woman. Together they spend much of the book struggling to protect the reputation of the revered short story writer E.I. Lonoff (another "Ghostwriter" holdover).

The space between Zuckerman at 23 and Zuckerman at 71 is the book's terrain, and it ought to be rich, but the soil feels cold and hard.

Coldness and hardness are all right, of course - they were practically the subjects of his last novel, "Everyman" - but here Roth spends a lot of time having Zuckerman tell us how reawakened he feels, how he can't believe he's been thrown right back in the mix, etc. The prose, a kind of scientific-journalese, tells another story:

"I told them that after I'd moved into the West 71st Street apartment we'd make arrangements for them to drive my stuff down to the city and for one of them then to drive my car back and, while I was away, for them to keep the car in their garage and be sure to run it from time to time."

It isn't all this stiff, but a lot of it is. The novel's press packet is full of words like "return" and "adventurer" and "explode," but this is mislabeling a tough-stemmed old weed placed in the flower case.

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HOLLYWOOD-PROOF

And this - the ability to track the blooms and withholdings in Roth's talent - is the real reason to read "Exit Ghost." And it's the real reason that literature's Rabbits and Zuckermans are so much more interesting than their Roman numeral trailing brethren in movie theaters.

The Zuckerman novels aren't at the mercy of rewrite teams and test audiences and actors who age out of step with the storyline. They're at the mercy only of Philip Roth and his singular talent, which, even at its wintriest, is something to behold.

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Ben Dolnick is a writer living in Brooklyn. He is the author of "Zoology," a novel.