His Life as A Writer

"The Great American Novel" was the final manifestation of the comic phase he'd entered with "Portnoy's Complaint." In this mode, "full of high jinks, full of energy," he created an imaginary baseball league and an endearingly inept last-place team -- not to mention a Jewish owner with a statistics-obsessed son.

"The sacrifice bunt is wrong ," the boy exclaims, pleading the case for scientific rationalism.

"Isaac, please," his father shoots back, "if de goyim say bunt, let dem bunt!"

Roth laughs at the reference. "That I borrowed from a book called 'Percentage Baseball,' by Earnshaw Cook," he says.

If only there'd been one called "Percentage Marriage," it might have been easier to finish "My Life as a Man."

After his string of false starts, he came up with a solution that foreshadowed later Roth strategies. He created a novelist-protagonist (Peter Tarnopol) who is alleged to be telling his story as nonfiction. And he had Tarnopol create another novelist-protagonist (Zuckerman) who serves up fictional variations on the same tortuous tale.

Why play with the fact-fiction divide like this?

Roth objects to the question. "I'm not playing with it," he says. "I don't care to play ." Then he discounts the complexity of the multiple-versions move:

"This man is trying to transform his experience into fiction. He imagines it once, he imagines it twice and says: 'The hell with it, here's the straight story.' As simple as that."

Depends how you define "simple," it would seem. But the fascinating thing is that when Roth eventually attempted his own nonfiction version, he couldn't keep it simple at all.

"The Facts," as originally written, unfolded as straight autobiography. It touched on Roth's childhood (presented largely as idyllic), his years at Bucknell University (where he discovered literature), his writing career and, most notably, his epic struggle with the wife whose name he changed to Josie.

Roth didn't like it.

"I just wasn't satisfied," he says. "I thought, 'Well, what about this and what about that?' and I thought, 'Well, articulate that.' So that made it truly autobiographical. Doubt, self -doubt, made it truly autobiographical -- because that's a big part of one's being a writer."

So he gave "The Facts" a new beginning and a new end.

The beginning consists of a letter from himself to Nathan Zuckerman, explaining what he'd tried to do and asking if the result was good enough to merit publication. The end offers Zuckerman's devastating 25-page reply.

"Don't publish," he tells Roth emphatically.

Then he rips Roth's autobiography to shreds, highlighting every single thing the poor schmuck has evaded, distorted or concealed.

* * *

"Let's face it, even the worst criticism contains some truth. They always see something you're trying to hide."

-- Diana Rutherford to Zuckerman, in "The Anatomy Lesson"

What to make of Roth's aggressive self-critique? Does Zuckerman's diatribe mean what you think it means: that Roth's understanding of his own life and work is both darker and more complex than he usually lets on?

Later, you'll have a chance to discuss this with Ross Miller, a Roth friend of two decades who's deep into writing a critical biography of the novelist.

"I think the epilogue-rebuttal in 'The Facts' is the truest and most revealing autobiography he's ever written," Miller will say.

But right now, Roth is in "I don't remember" mode again. You're reduced to casting out lines from Zuckerman's analysis, hoping for nibbles of response.

Here's Zuckerman on Roth's compulsive fictionalizing of his experience: "My guess is that you've written metamorphoses of yourself so many times, you no longer have any idea what you are or ever were. By now what you are is a walking text."

"Tough guy," is Roth's reply.

Here Zuckerman's take on Roth's escape from the womb of home and family: "Very neat, but where's the struggle? . . . Because if there wasn't a struggle, then it just doesn't seem like Philip Roth to me."

"Big mouth," Roth jokes. He laughs, but says no more.

And here's Zuckerman on Maggie/Josie as an aid to that escape: "And if I'm right, at the end of the tunnel, waiting like your moll in the getaway car, was Josie, embodying everything the Jewish haven was not . . ."

Another laugh.

The material is so rich you can't begin to cite it all. Still, you read part of a long passage the point of which is that Roth -- a man used to being "the dominating consciousness in every situation," somebody "mentally very tricky, who hears the reverberations of everything he's ever said" -- met his psychic match in Josie.

You go on to mention Zuckerman's belief that his creator's anger, which Roth suggests was a result of his marriage, must really have preceded it -- or "I doubt that Josie would have come into your life . . ."

Anger directed at a woman: This is dangerous territory. You're glad to have Zuckerman as your front man when you venture in. But Roth shuts down the topic anyway.

He really doesn't remember "The Facts," he says.

Okay.

This might be a good time to bring up an argument that's been repeatedly made about Roth's work, one captured in the hyped-up headline of a recent piece by Chicago Tribune critic Julia Keller. "Philip Roth hates women," it blares, before throwing in some qualifying questions: "Is that true? And does it matter?"

Keller's answers: Yes, it's true, though only if by "hates women" you actually mean "his women have no souls." And yes, it matters, because Roth, whom she calls "a provocative and prolific genius," is "the best novelist in America."

She's a newspaper writer, so she can be a little glib. But Keller's indictment is intriguing because of the arguments it avoids. She doesn't care about Roth's personal life and thus makes no use of the unflattering portrait his second wife, actress Claire Bloom, published after their 1994 divorce. Nor is she concerned with the sexual preoccupations of Roth's male characters.

She just wants the women to be more complex: to make moral choices, to have epiphanies, to be granted "the same radiant singularity" Roth grants his guys.

You'd like to ask him about all this directly, but it seems clear -- or at least that's your excuse -- that persistent questions about what he calls "these cliches" would end the interview. Better perhaps to remind him of another insight he put in Zuckerman's mouth.

If Roth wanted to "reminisce productively" about his first marriage, Zuckerman suggested, "maybe what you should be writing, instead of autobiography, are thirty thousand words from Josie's point of view."

Roth considers the notion, then rejects it.

He writes, he says, "about the lives of men."

* * *

"I was a biography in perpetual motion, memory to the marrow of my bones."

-- Nathan Zuckerman in "American Pastoral"

Men's lives evolve, of course, as they grow older. Zuckerman's certainly has.

"Time has passed and he's changed," says Roth of the quieter, less libidinous character into which the once-raging novelist-celebrity has been transformed. This new Zuckerman is more attuned to the outside world, more drawn to stories not his own.

The interview time is passing as well. Abruptly, though with apologies, Roth announces that he has to go in two minutes.

You've barely touched on his most recent work -- 2004's best-selling "The Plot Against America," this year's less successful "Everyman." You'd love to talk more about "Patrimony," the stark, moving memoir he wrote about his father's death. There's no time to ask him what he's working on or what he's reading. He writes in the daytime and reads in the evenings, compulsively marking passages in the literature he consumes.

Roth has urged you to read more of his later novels, and you will. You'll have some things to ask about should you ever meet again. There's the former Miss New Jersey in "American Pastoral," for example, who spends much of her energy trying to ensure that that label doesn't define her.

Interesting.

And then there's the 34-year-old woman with the horrific past in "The Human Stain," who dies, like Roth's wife, in a car crash -- but who's been given a fierce dignity that transcends her brutalization at the hands of men.

The Library of America is planning eight Roth volumes, with the last to be issued in 2013. One more question: Won't there be additional Philip Roth books by then?

"We'll see how much more I write," Roth says. "We'll talk about it."

He grins like a man whose getaway car is waiting.

"I'll meet you here."