What a cunning, clever, courageous and consummate writer Philip Roth still is after more than 25 books, beginning with his remarkable 1959 collection “Goodbye, Columbus.” Among all living American writers, Roth is perhaps the most deserving candidate for a Nobel Prize, which would sit alongside his Pulitzer Prize, National Book Awards and many other honors.

Inevitably using both factual and fictitious elements of his life and his deepest passions and conflicts—especially in the realm of the erotic—Roth never fails to construct an engrossing story with fascinating characters who reside in the real historical, political and social context of American life.

His most recent novel, “Exit Ghost,” is no exception. The main character and narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, who Roth has followed in nine novels, is now 71 years old (Roth turned 74 this year). Through Zuckerman, Roth explores the internal struggles of an older man—the frustrations of a complex mind grappling with the contradictions of youthful dreams and passions, a lifetime of adult experiences, self-knowledge and memory—along with the losses and fears of a declining body and weakening mind.

In the book, Zuckerman returns to New York City after 11 years of near seclusion in the Berkshires, where he sought to withdraw from the world and find peace of mind. In the country, he read no newspapers and watched no TV, spending his days writing novels and listening to music. Zuckerman hoped to “relinquish love, desire, quarrels, professional conflict, the whole messy legacy of the past,” and reconcile himself to the painful consequences of surgery for the prostate cancer that had reduced his capacity to live his normally vigorous and turbulent life.

Returning to the city to visit an urologist who might be able to correct some of his physical problems, Zuckerman promptly falls under the spell of an attractive, intelligent, 30-year-old married woman, Jamie Logan, who wants to exchange her New York apartment for a peaceful place in the country. Simultaneously, Zuckerman becomes enmeshed in a fight to protect the reputation of a deceased but deeply esteemed writer-mentor, E. I. Lonoff (who also appeared in the first Zuckerman novel), from an ambitious, obnoxiously aggressive young writer, Richard Kliman, who plans to write a biography that will reveal a dark secret of Lonoff’s life—and who may also be Jamie’s secret lover.

“Exit Ghost” is a book about desire—the desire of an aging, damaged man to be whole and feel alive again through his longing for a woman and his battle to protect a beloved writer’s reputation.

“There is the pain of being in the world, but there is also the robustness,” Zuckerman muses. “Let the intensity out! Let the belligerence out! … both Kliman and Jamie having the effect of rousing the virility in me again, the virility of mind and spirit and desire and intention and wanting to be with people again and have a fight again and have a woman again and feeling the pleasure of one’s power again.”

But, he soon remembers who he is now, the actual body that his mind inhabits: “… there is no virility. There is only the brevity of expectations.”

Later, he thinks, “I was learning at seventy-one what it is to be deranged … Proving that the drama that is associated usually with the young as they begin to enter life … can also startle and lay siege to the aged … even as circumstance readies them for departure.”

Jamie is an intriguing character in Roth’s pantheon of fictional women. A tease who is aware of both her powers and weaknesses, she is direct, honest, insightful, empathic, internally troubled, restless, strong-willed and wild, yet she seeks to control her temptations to live on the edge.

In one of the imaginary HE & SHE dialogues that Zuckerman constructs after being with Jamie, the following exchange occurs:

SHE: What interests you so much about me?
HE: Your youth and your beauty. The erotic environment you create out of words  It’s a fever. I can only explain it by saying that I want to be alone in a room with you. I want to be under your spell.
SHE: I’m glad you’re getting what you want.
HE: It’s heartbreaking.

And, in a later dialogue, near the end of the book:

HE: I adore you.
SHE: You don’t adore me. The words are meaningless. You strike me as a person who was spoiling for adventure but didn’t know it … I’m talking to a virtually inhumanly disciplined, rational person who has lost all sense of proportion and entered into a desperate story of unreasonable wishes. Yet that is what it is to be in life, isn’t it? What it is to forge a life. You know your reason can reassert itself at any time—and if it does, there goes life and the instability that is life … Start another book and get into it and we’ll see how much you adore Jamie Logan.

In “Exit Ghost,” Roth has done it again. He mixes life and fiction to produce an engrossing, beautifully written novel of fierce honesty, posing questions of eternal interest to all who wish to live life in full awareness.