For Roth, a 3rd PEN/Faulkner Win

The portrait that emerged was of a man defined by his relationships -- as a father, a lover, a husband, a son, a friend -- and, increasingly, by their loss. As he ages, he loses most of the connections that mattered to him, including a much loved second wife who repudiates him after he indulges in an ill-considered affair.

"She was, he realized, the best thing in his life, and he took a great gamble, and he lost," Roth said, sounding like a man who knows this territory firsthand.

As people grow older, of course, concern with mortality increases. "Over 60 seems to be the trigger," Roth said. "If they're not thinking about death, they're measuring": How many years do they have left, and "are they going to be good years?"

For Roth's protagonist, the answer to this second question is no. In addition to his fraying human bonds, he lost his vocation when he retired as an art director for an advertising agency, and this loss has proved difficult to bear.

Roth seems intent on hanging on to his own vocation as long as possible. He has finished his next book, "Exit Ghost," to be published this fall; it will feature Nathan Zuckerman, the Roth-like novelist to whom he has returned again and again. And he's already a hundred pages into his next project.

"Few writers retire," Roth said. That's the good news.

The bad news is that their work often weakens as they age. Roth thinks this relates to short-term memory loss. "You have to remember the last page you wrote" and what you were thinking as you wrote it, he explained. Thus as your memory goes, you "feel it as a true deficit, an impediment to work."

Luckily, said the three-time PEN/Faulkner winner, this hasn't happened to him yet.

" 'Yet' with a capital Y," he added.