In The Anatomy Lesson, Roth described a phenomenon with which he would become even more intimately familiar in the years ahead: “The job was to give pain its due while at the same time rendering accurately the devastation it wreaks upon reason, dignity, pride, maturity, independence—upon all of one’s human credentials.” That Zuckerman supports his aching neck with a thesaurus his father gave him as a boy (“From Dad—you have my every confidence”) would suggest the pain is “felt at a distance from its source,” as the book’s epigraph from the Textbook of Orthopedic Medicine would have it, and never mind the hero’s impotence as a writer ever since his father, on his deathbed, called him a bastard. But then, such an explanation is too pat for a writer of Zuckerman’s subtlety, and he wonders whether he’s actually being tortured by the terrible, life-denying requirements of his vocation per se. Martin Amis’s quip about Roth’s morbid reflexiveness—reduced to writing an “autobiographical novel about what it’s like to write autobiographical novels”—applies far more to The Anatomy Lesson than its predecessor. Zuckerman wishes he could write about someone who really suffers, like his Polish lover, Jaga—“the world of massive historical pain instead of this pain in the neck”—but realizes he could hardly be a writer at all without the subject of his own “semi-comical” suffering, such as it is. “My life as cud, that’s what I’m running out on,” he tells a doctor friend, explaining why he wants to go to medical school both as relief and atonement. “Swallow as experience, then up from the gut for a second go as art. . . . too much inward-dwelling, Bob, too much burrowing back.”

  But why atone for what he’d coughed up from his gut? “If he agreed with the Appels and their admonitions, he wouldn’t have written those books in the first place.” Zuckerman likes to believe he’s squeezed the Nice Jewish Boy out of himself drop by drop, while at bottom he’s almost as apt to appease his detractors as revolt against them (a dialectic that also defined his high-minded, impious creator): “Zuckerman is all too conscious of what he’s up to, as M.D. and as porno king,” Roth explained to Updike: “willed extremism at either end of the moral spectrum. My theme, son.” Disgusted, on one level, by his penitent journey to Chicago and (maybe) medical school, Zuckerman adopts the identity of his sternest critic and turns him into the zany, debauched publisher of Lickety Split (“Je m’appelle Appel”), whose aria of obscenity ends only when he cracks his jaw against a gravestone. (Roth was thinking of another reproachful elder, Rabbi Rackman, who’d demanded of the Anti-Defamation League, “What is being done to silence this man?” “And that’s why I broke Zuckerman’s jaw,” said Roth. “I did it for the rabbi.”) Gagged at last, Zuckerman gets outside of himself long enough to focus on the suffering of others—a woman at the hospital, for instance, whose face is half-eaten by cancer:

  There was a hole in her cheek the size of a quarter. Through it Zuckerman could see her tongue as it nervously skittered about inside her mouth. The jawbone itself was partially exposed, an inch of it as white and clean as enamel tile. The rest, up to the eye socket, was a chunk of raw flesh, something off the butcher’s floor to cut up for the cat. He tried not to inhale the smell. . . . This is life. With real teeth in it.

  Roth liked this ending so much that he again discarded/tabled a previous ending, set in Prague, which he’d always envisaged as the proper conclusion to Zuckerman’s education in “the unforeseen consequences of art.” The first three books had examined the writer’s life in a land where “everything goes and nothing matters,” a phrase Roth invoked in The Paris Review as having defined every aspect of his own career. Asked about his influence on “the culture,” Roth replied it was roughly what it would have been if he’d followed his original plan to be a lawyer: “In an enormous commercial society that demands complete freedom of expression, the culture is a maw.” He moreover insisted that he was content to have it so, rather than embrace the alternative evoked in The Prague Orgy—his novella-length epilogue, published in Zuckerman Bound, that was meant to serve as “a lamp that shined backwards”: from Czechoslovakia, where writers who aspire to cultural relevance are grievously punished—banned, jailed, exiled, forced into menial jobs—while, in the West, Zuckerman is “profusely” and “bizarrely” rewarded for writing a dirty book.

  Thus Zuckerman’s “dwarf drama” is put into final perspective—a matter made even more explicit in the screen version of The Prague Orgy that Roth was soon to write, wherein the Klíma/Kundera composite, Bolotka, mocks Zuckerman for his sheepish wish to make amends: “So why are you here? To play a ‘worthwhile’ role? To do a little, tiny penance for being spared the twentieth century?” At the museum where he works as a janitor, Bolotka leads the American into a storage room and invites him to swap clothing. “Now I will be the free man with a troubled conscience,” Bolotka giddily declares, once Zuckerman is wearing the man’s overalls. Meanwhile the regime rewards only such hacks as the culture minister, Novak, who’s aghast to learn that his favorite American book, Betsy MacDonald’s The Egg and I, has been all but forgotten in the decadent West. Again the vast disparity between the two worlds lends itself to cinematic treatment: Zuckerman returns to the “dense, enormous” freedom of New York—shown with a helicopter shot along the Hudson—while in voice-over “NOVAK describes small, imprisoned Czechoslovakia,” where only philistines like himself may thrive: “people who know how to submit decently to their historical misfortune! These are the people to whom we owe the survival of our beloved land, and not to alienated, degenerate, egomaniacal artistes!”‡

  When Zuckerman Bound was published in May 1985, Roth prepared to lie low in Connecticut and thus avoid the “ritual slaughter” of the reviews, while allowing himself to hope that the “thematic architecture” of the novels would become more apparent once they were published in a single volume—a hope amply rewarded by Harold Bloom’s definitive front-page rave in the Times Book Review: “Zuckerman Bound merits something reasonably close to the highest level of esthetic praise for tragicomedy, partly because as a formal totality it becomes much more than the sum of its parts,” the Yale mandarin wrote. “Roth has earned a permanent place in American literature by a comic genius that need never be doubted again, wherever it chooses to take him next.” Roth was becoming harder for the cultural maw to devour.

  EVER SINCE FINISHING his trilogy and epilogue, Roth had felt a growing desire to “sink [his] teeth into something new and BIG,” though months passed while he did little more than stare at his Selectric. When Bloom was invited to perform at the Jerusalem Festival in late May 1984, Roth was eager for a change of scenery, even if it meant playing Stage Door Johnny again. Ever the dutiful student, he asked a knowledgeable friend to recommend books about modern Israel and Zionism generally.

  They stayed at Mishkenot Sha’ananim (“Peaceful Dwellings”), a row of guesthouses provided by the city for visiting academics and artists, just outside the walls of Old Jerusalem. It was Roth’s first trip to Israel since the summer of 1963, and he looked up old friends such as Amos Elon, the prominent left-wing journalist who wrote for Haaretz and The New York Review of Books. Through Elon he met luminaries like Shimon Peres, soon to be prime minister, whom Roth liked but was advised, by Elon, not to trust (“I don’t have to trust or not trust anyone,” Roth wrote Malamud, “—I just mostly listen”). Roth also gave an interview to the Mishkenot Sha’ananim Newsletter, as a courtesy to his hosts, though he’d declined to meet with other members of the Israeli press. “He has been called the Woody Allen of words and the Meyer Lansky of Jewish culture,” Idith Zertal introduced him to newsletter readers. “He is said to be ready to sell his heritage for a few laughs. . . . This man, whose most intimate habits, whose darkest fancies, are supposedly familiar to millions of people, has become one of the most private public figures in the United States.” Zertal seemed determined to make the most of things, though her peculiar truculence seemed almost to have a mellowing effect on Roth. “That goy?” she said, when Roth mentioned Updike in passing. “I mean Updike, the American writer,” he replied. “He’s one of my contemporaries and I’m very interested in what he does too.”

  Roth detected a kind of “pressure” in Jerusalem that he hadn’t felt since Prague, and was eager to learn more. Equipped with “a list a yard long of people to look up,” he returned a few months later with David Plante, whom he introduced as Claire Bloom at a pompous party. Privately he told his friend (“just between you and your diary”) that he needed to know what a gentile like Plante made of things: Roth had started a novel with a (provisionally) gentile character, and he wanted this character to meet a few narrow-minded Israeli “fanatics” on the right, the ones who wanted to annex the West Bank through violent means, if necessary, versus the “fair minded, intelligent, humanist, cultured” liberals whom Roth already knew in sufficient number.

  The next day Roth informed Plante that they’d have to pay extra for a taxi because of the danger involved in driving to Ofra, a West Bank settlement whose Arab residents had been known to stone cars and the Jews inside them. Roth had arranged to meet Israel Harel, a settlement leader who glibly insisted the occupiers enjoyed good relations with the local Arabs. “All Philip said in reaction, again and again,” Plante noted, “was, ‘Ah-hun, ah-hun.’ ” Afterward Harel and an American woman showed the two writers around the settlement: the kindergarten, print shop, and a group of older students sitting around a table. Referring to the West Bank as Judea and Samaria—lands rightfully belonging to Israel, according to the Bible—a brash young man asked Roth what he thought of the settlements. Roth smiled: “I have to tell you that everything that has to do with this country is peripheral to my real interests. I’m here because I’m curious.” A couple of days later, he met an even more invaluable “treasure,” the right-wing lawyer Elyakim Haetzni, who packed a revolver while driving Roth around the Arab city of Hebron and the huge Jewish settlement of Kiryat Abba; Haetzni’s colorful pontifications would be reproduced at length in The Counterlife, where he appears as the aptly named Lippman. That night Roth and Plante had dinner chez Amos Elon. A staunch advocate of Palestinian statehood and total withdrawal from the occupied territories, Elon became furious when Plante remarked that he’d been “impressed” by Harel: “He told me it was as if I had been impressed by Himmler,” Plante wrote in his diary. “Israel Harel was a criminal. He was the chairman of a movement that shot off the kneecaps of Arab leaders, threw bombs into bus loads of innocent Arab children, wanted to dispossess Arabs of their land and homes.” Plante got the impression Elon’s anger was really directed at Roth, whom he sternly lectured, alone, in a separate room after dinner.

  Israel had changed since the wars of 1967 and 1973. “It wasn’t Israel as California anymore,” said Roth. “It was Israel as the Middle East, and all that people could talk about was politics.” At the heart of the debate were the compromises of nationalism—the violence and injustice involved in countering enemies on all sides, and within, which seemed essential to the maintenance of the Jewish state even as it bristled against the Jewish conscience, not to say the world’s, what with its readiness to condemn Jewish moral imperfection. “I was getting it from all sides in Israel,” said Roth, “which was the best thing that could have happened.”

  When he returned to Israel yet again in February 1985, he spent much of his time with the novelist Aharon Appelfeld—a small, bald, round-faced man with “the playfully thoughtful air of a benign wizard,” as Roth put it; the two had met at a London literary party a few years before, and liked each other immediately. Appelfeld’s harrowing childhood in the midst of the Holocaust, Roth liked to say, could scarcely have been more at odds with his own sheltered idyll in Weequahic. Appelfeld’s mother had been murdered by the Romanian army in 1941, when Aharon was eight, and eventually the boy escaped from a concentration camp in Transnistria and spent three years on the run—hiding in the woods, working as a shepherd, all the while concealing his Jewishness; finally he joined the Soviet army as a cook, and subsequently immigrated to Palestine. Roth would spend hours discussing “the sum of all these Jewish antinomies” with the author of Badenheim 1939, either at a pleasant café where Appelfeld went each day to write, the Ticho House, or during long walks all over Jerusalem.

  Once again Roth had found a place where “everything matters,” and suddenly “the bits and pieces of crap” he’d managed to write over the past year began, he said, “to flash signals and to arrange themselves in little constellations and I think I may be on the brink of an idea that won’t bore me.” He began to think of Israel and England as counterimages—the West Bank and Gloucestershire, Jerusalem and London—with opposing notions of Jewish assertiveness and self-hatred. Appelfeld had much to say about the latter, “an ancient Jewish ailment which in modern times has taken on various guises,” as he remarked in a New York Times interview with Roth: “I grew up with the feeling that anything Jewish was blemished. From my earliest childhood my gaze was directed at the beauty of non-Jews. They were blond and tall and behaved naturally.” Roundly accused of self-hatred for much of his career, Roth had witnessed the phenomenon at close range in London—embodied most vividly by his “Good Fairy,” as Idith Zertal had described Bloom during the couple’s first and last trip to Israel together. Exposed to an alarming mass of Jews at a bus station in Jerusalem, Bloom had been moved to comment on their “hideous faces.” As Roth remembered: “ ‘If we were in Italy, if we were in Greece,’ she told me, ‘the people are beautiful there!’ I promised then to take her to the swarming bus stations of Naples and Genoa and Athens and Salonika, where she could gaze undisturbed upon all the undisgusting faces jamming those Italian and Greek buses.” The “nasty, hateful scene” ended with Bloom in tears: “Don’t you see—it’s a sickness,” she sobbed.

  Hitherto Roth had been somewhat stymied in his attempts to write about England, since, as he put it, he didn’t hate anything there: “a writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see.” Now, almost everywhere he looked, he saw evidence of English anti-Semitism. He’d almost forgotten an incident several years ago, during his trip abroad with Ann Mudge, when a dowager at the Connaught had been so affronted by the sight of a lovely blonde woman dining with a Jew that she’d loudly complained about the “stink” while glaring in Roth’s direction. He was reminded of this, dining with Bloom, when he heard a woman regale her companion (and indirectly Roth) about “a disgusting little Jew” who’d sold her a ring and “naturally” cheated her; she kept repeating the words “little Jew” until (over Bloom’s mortified protests) Roth approached her table and called her a scumbag. In the hope of provoking such people all the more, he grew a beard that augmented his already conspicuously Semitic features§—and sure enough, as he remarked to Julian Mitchell, when he went to the loo at the Royal Automobile Club nowadays, he sensed the scrutiny of fellow members who looked to see whether he was circumcised (“this may have been a joke,” said Mitchell, “but I don’t think it was”).

  Back in 1970, Roth had written Mitchell that his agonies over what would eventually become My Life as a Man had forced him into “being ‘experimental,’ which is only to say that I don’t know where I am, and am so sick of fiction, and every fifty pages see through the fictional disguises, and so drop what I’m doing and start out a new way . . . and so I’ve decided that that’s my book, those fifty pages of transparency piled atop one another. A grim business.” The process had resolved itself in his using only the two notional beginnings—“Salad Days” and “Courting Disaster”—before getting on with his hero’s “True Story”; now, in the early stages of The Counterlife, he found himself again writing a series of “false starts” that suddenly began to cohere like filings to a magnet. “I wrote one section and then I thought, ‘What if the opposite happened?’ ”—and one such opposite was a chance to kill off Zuckerman: a nice way to silence critics who said he always wrote about his own experience (“Now I only hope I don’t kick off before the book comes out,” he told the Times, “—otherwise the wisdom will be that I based Zuckerman’s funeral on my own”). When Susan Sontag later congratulated him on the “meta-narrative” of The Counterlife, Roth assured her he had no such aesthetic theory in mind, but rather was simply receptive to “the authority of dreams, in which characters who appear to be the same, are at least called XYZ in one dream after another, turn up dead and then alive and then turn out to be ‘oneself,’ etc.” He was, in short, trusting his confusion—a directive that would stand him in good stead as his work continued to evolve in startling ways.

  IN AUGUST 1982, shortly after his own diagnosis of heart disease, Roth had visited Malamud while the man was recuperating from a stroke and bypass surgery: “Real to me now,” Roth wrote in his notes. “Looks weak and vulnerable. Listing a little to one side.” However diminished, Malamud impressed Roth with his determination to get on with his work, though he could hardly read at the time. “You have written wonderful books and you have been a kind, brave, and generous colleague—even when vexed,” Roth wrote him afterward, with seeming contrition.