His Life as A Writer

The man may be a figment of Philip Roth's imagination. His biography is not necessarily Roth's. But Nathan Zuckerman has more insight into his celebrated creator than any other human being -- living, fictional or dead.

* * *

"Life and art are distinct, thought Zuckerman; what could be clearer? Yet the distinction is wholly elusive. That writing is an act of imagination seems to perplex and infuriate everyone."

-- Philip Roth, "The Anatomy Lesson"

About that "America's greatest living writer" thing: Here are some reasons to believe.

To start with, there's the fact that the Library of America has chosen to publish the collected works of only three writers while they were still alive: Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.

Welty and Bellow have since died. You do the math.

Then there's the utterly unscientific but nonetheless revealing survey that the New York Times Book Review published last spring, in which it asked a cadre of literary luminaries to name the best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years. Toni Morrison's "Beloved" took the top slot, but Roth managed to stand out nonetheless: No fewer than six of his books -- more than any competitor's -- received multiple votes.

But the most compelling argument for Roth's preeminence arises from the astonishing run he had in the 1990s. Over a span of just six years, he won all four major American writing awards, each for a different book: the National Book Critics Circle Award for "Patrimony," the PEN/Faulkner Award for "Operation Shylock," the National Book Award for "Sabbath's Theater" and the Pulitzer Prize for "American Pastoral."

All this as he was entering his seventh decade, an age when many writers, if not in steep decline, have at least started slowing down.

Roth published his first book, "Goodbye, Columbus," in 1959, and a writing career spanning six decades is too much to deal with in one interview. But you can't spend 90 minutes with him without at least nodding in the direction of the 1969 bestseller that remains his most notorious work.

"Portnoy's Complaint" was a literary hand grenade perfectly suited to the explosive decade that produced it. A comic, hyperbolic howl of protest against oppressive authority -- in this case, by a "nice Jewish boy" repressed and stressed by the expectations of the striving immigrant culture in which he was raised -- the novel limned its protagonist's sexual obsession with a profane fluency that obscured an undercurrent of pain.