Paradoxical Anne: The Holocaust and Fantastic Invention in Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer

Abstract: The Ghost Writer (1979) grapples with the Holocaust as a “limit event” as well as the geographic and psychic distance between the event and twentieth century Jewish American life, doing so by defamiliarizing the historical figure and character of Anne Frank. Within the novel, Roth turns to the tropes of the fantastic, and to science fiction, or sf, in particular—a genre with unique capacity to address those events most resistant to expression through the creation of instances of cognitive novelty, such as the impossible creation of a living Anne Frank doppelganger in Amy Bellette. This new reading of the novel brings its inherent paradox to the forefront, speaking to the mounting force of the Holocaust within Roth’s work and the appeal and limited power of science fiction to represent it.