Roth writing last Zuckerman novel

So long, Nathan Zuckerman.

Philip Roth’s fictional alter ego – a famous Jewish novelist featured in such novels as “The Ghost Writer” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “American Pastoral” – will appear for the last time in Roth’s “Exit Ghost,” coming out next fall.

According to Houghton Mifflin, “Exit Ghost” is a “portrait of the artist as an old man.”

“Bedeviled by the powers he’s lost, fearful of losing the powers that remain – and that are vital to his vocation – Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York after 11 years of living as a solitary, reclusive writer in the rural hills of western Massachusetts,” the publisher says in a statement.

“His encounters in New York with a new generation of writers and with an old, dying friend produce revelations that gravely unsettle him and make of the final Zuckerman book a moving study of obsession, forgetfulness, resignation, and ungratifiable desire.”

Mortality is also the theme of the 73-year-old Roth’s current novel, “Everyman,” which he has said was inspired in part by the death of his close friend, Nobel laureate Saul Bellow.