Although Nathan thinks he's embraced the ascetic life - "by paring and paring and paring away," he says, "I found in my solitude a species of freedom that was to my liking much of the time" - he's been living in a monkish bubble that's cut him off from ordinary human commerce and connection. He often goes days at a time without speaking to anyone, save his housekeeper or caretaker. He doesn't watch movies or television, doesn't own a cell phone, a VCR, a DVD player or a computer. He continues "to live in the Age of the Typewriter," claiming he doesn't know what the World Wide Web is and no longer bothers to vote.
"I had banished my country," he says, "been myself banished from erotic contact with women, and was lost through battle fatigue to the world of love."
Attracted to Jamie and shocked at what has happened to Amy Bellette in the years since he last saw her, Nathan finds himself grappling with feelings he'd thought he'd stifled many years ago and experiencing "the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again." The two women's stories converge in the person of Richard Kliman, Jamie's former boyfriend, who now happens to be working on a biography of E.I. Lonoff that Amy wants to prevent.
Kliman is another one of those annoying and importunate characters - like Alvin Pepler in Zuckerman Unbound and Moishe Pipik in Operation Shylock - who pester Roth's heroes, and Nathan regards him as everything he detests: an unworthy rival for Jamie's affections and an ambitious literary parasite out to topple Lonoff from his pedestal (by revealing an incestuous affair this great writer purportedly had when he was young).
Kliman also represents youth to Nathan's decrepitude: While Kliman is one of the "not-yets" with "no idea how quickly things turn out another way," Nathan belongs to the group of "no-longers," "losing faculties, losing control, shamefully dispossessed from themselves, marked by deprivation and experiencing the organic rebellion staged by the body against the elderly."
It's unclear just how much of Kliman's agenda is imagined by Nathan, who after all once endowed Amy Bellette with the legendary biography of Anne Frank, and who's begun turning all his conversations with Jamie into an imaginary dialogue between an imaginary "He" and "She" - a dialogue that "was an aid to nothing, alleviated nothing, achieved nothing" and yet "seemed terribly necessary to write."
This, of course, is Nathan's habit - continually to complicate his life on paper, while continually complaining about readers who would confuse fact and fiction, life and art.
As usual, Nathan, like his creator, anticipates the reader's question: "But isn't one's pain quotient shocking enough without fictional amplification, without giving things an intensity that is ephemeral in life and sometimes even unseen?"
His answer: "Not for some. For some very, very few that amplification, evolving uncertainly out of nothing, constitutes their only assurance, and the unlived, the surmise, fully drawn in print on paper, is the life whose meaning comes to matter most."
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