Israel then is the embodiment of Roth’s theme of reversal and change—a nation of Jews tending to aggression and vengeance—and hence the Israel chapters, with their emphasis on politics and history, are regarded by some as a milestone in Roth’s work. “It was as if he regained the world as a subject,” said Solotaroff. “He started going back to the past with a purpose beyond ‘Let’s see what it was like when I was thirty.’ ” Of course the process was well under way with The Prague Orgy, though Updike, for one, thought both works were a little too mechanically polemical—“The conversations deteriorate into blocks of talk, one babbled essay after another”—a defect that would if anything become more pronounced until, finally, in certain parts of the American Trilogy, rival viewpoints are more seamlessly subsumed into the narrative. Meanwhile, in The Counterlife, Roth occasionally sacrificed plausibility for the sake of getting his ideas across—as when an Israeli security goon, a self-described “grease monkey,” indulges in erudite historical analysis and literary allusion (“Who’s the little Jew with a cigar in T. S. Eliot’s wonderful poem?”) while lecturing Nathan on “the universal loathing of the Jewish id, and the goy’s half-hidden, justifiable fear of wild, belated Jewish justice.”

  Back in Christendom, Nathan falls in love with his dream shiksa, Maria Freshfield, but the idyll ends when he can’t help sweeping her up in a blanket indictment of her family’s—and England’s—ineradicable anti-Semitism. In the crypt of a Gloucestershire church, Maria’s older sister elaborates the nature of her mother’s sordid misgivings where his union with Maria is concerned: “I don’t think she really likes the idea of her languid, helpless Maria submitting to anal domination by a Jew.” Just as Henry discovers his brother’s fictionalized versions of his life, so Maria reads the manuscript of “Christendom” and is repelled by its monstrous distortion of what she’d once told Nathan was her mother’s “touch of anti-Semitism.” Aghast at such a hateful narrative, Maria decides to quit the marriage and indeed the novel itself.

  And on this “coyly Pirandelloian” (Updike) point, Lehmann-Haupt was hardly alone in throwing up his hands. “A character in a book within a book deciding to take no further part in the narrative?” wrote Julian Barnes in the London Review of Books. “Not far from here lies preciosity, and perhaps there is a thinning of our interest as overt fictionality stomps on imagined life.” But again, as Roth would have it, truth is what our imaginations make and remake of it, and whatever odious thing Nathan sees fit to make of Maria’s family, in the context of art, is a valid extension of the England he comes to know. As for Maria herself, he (Roth) congratulated himself on having created “the most intelligent woman in American literature since Isabel Archer”—an accomplishment not at all vitiated by Nathan’s conclusion, “There is no you, Maria, any more than there’s a me.”

  Give or take the odd quibble, the overall response to The Counterlife was positive bordering on ecstatic, and for a while Roth allowed himself to enjoy it (“a favorable review in Commentary!”). Soon, however, the clouds began to regather, as he decided that what his former detractors had really liked about the book was its relative good manners. “ ‘The deballing of Zuckerman is complete,’ as the bearded fellow says,” he wrote Rieff.* “That’s what their fucking approval is all about. They can shove it.”

  Nevertheless he was glad to get the prizes that followed, as they were his first in twenty-eight years and seemed to augur (contra Howe et al.) a promising change in the cultural climate. “You don’t appear to be worried because my book fails to propose a remedy for what is troublesomely Jewish in these lives,” he said, accepting that year’s National Jewish Book Award while noting Chekhov’s formulation that it isn’t the writer’s part “to offer a solution to a problem but, rather, to provide a proper presentation of the problem.” As for that year’s National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction, it came down to a “heated discussion” over the merits of two finalists: The Counterlife and The Bonfire of the Vanities. “Why, that’s lak choosin’ between a flea and a louse,” said the Kentucky-born Elizabeth Hardwick (or so Joel Conarroe, her fellow judge, remembered). Roth prevailed ten votes to six, and, when notified, left a return message on Conarroe’s machine regretting that he’d have to miss the “Circle Jerk Prize” because he’d be in Israel again but would send a tape recording of his acceptance speech. On the appointed evening, then, Roth’s disembodied voice assured the audience once more that he wrote fiction, not confession: “The butcher, imagination, wastes no times with niceties: it clubs the fact over the head, quickly it slits the throat, and then with its bare hands, it pulls forth the guts. . . . By the time the imagination is finished with a fact, believe me, it bears no resemblance to a fact.”

  IN LATE APRIL 1986, Roth went with his friend Gaia Servadio to hear Primo Levi give a talk at the Italian Cultural Institute in Belgrave Square; Roth considered Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz† “a masterpiece for ten different reasons” and had long wanted to meet the author. Levi, in turn, had read only one of Roth’s books—Lamento di Portnoy—and therefore warily implored their mutual friend, Servadio, to come along as a translator and buffer. Both Servadio and Levi wrote for La Stampa, Levi’s hometown newspaper in Turin, and Levi also knew Servadio’s father, a fellow chemist whose mother had died at Auschwitz. As it happened, he and Roth got along famously: “Meeting with you was for me a supererogatory and unhoped for pleasure,” Levi wrote him afterward, “although hampered by language friction and by a noisy environment.”

  A few months later, Roth traveled to Turin to interview Levi for The New York Times, since the latter’s Monkey’s Wrench was about to be published in the States. Roth asked his host to show him around the paint factory where he’d been employed as a research chemist—a vocation, Roth thought, reflected in certain aspects of Survival in Auschwitz, which showed how a man could be “broken down and, like a substance decomposing in a chemical reaction, lose his characteristic properties,” as Roth remarked during their interview. “Nothing belongs to us anymore,” Levi had written; “they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find in ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.” Toward the end of a three-day visit, La Stampa sent a photographer to capture the two writers chatting happily in Levi’s study; in another room of the house, Levi’s aged mother lay incapacitated, unwilling to let anybody but her son feed and care for her. Apart from that, Levi seemed content; he and Roth shared an emotional embrace on parting. “I don’t know which of us is the younger brother and which is the older brother,” said Levi. As Roth would later reflect, “I felt the great good fortune of one who believes himself to have made a most extraordinary new friend for life.”

  Roth himself was about to begin a long spell of misery. In November he abruptly returned to London, canceling all further Counterlife publicity in New York. He’d thrown out his back a few weeks before, and now was taking the opioid Percodan every three or four hours, along with a cocktail of other medications including the muscle relaxant Robaxin. Alone in Connecticut, he couldn’t function otherwise; Sandy came from Chicago for a week or so to cook and care for him, but afterward Philip quickly deteriorated. “Halcion,” he wrote in his diary on October 9, referring to the sleeping pill he’d been given because of drug-related insomnia. “Hallucinations. Panic. Bad drug trip.” For a while he stopped taking the pill, though one night he was shaking and sweating so badly that he begged his neighbors the Grays to let him spend the night—a kindness for which he remained grateful even in the midst of later bitterness (“You’re welcome to be a boy again at any time in any room of the house,” Francine wrote him afterward). Finally, at the Wyndham in New York, Roth became so angst-ridden that Rieff had to keep him company until morning. “Throw the pills down the toilet,” Dr. Kleinschmidt advised, and Roth did as he was told, returning to London in an agony of panic and pain.

  Within a few weeks he “felt something happen to [his] knee” while frog kicking in the Royal Automobile Club swimming pool, and soon he could walk only short distances—a dire situation: in the absence of beta-blockers, he was all the more dependent on exercise to keep his heart healthy. Meanwhile his companions on Fawcett Street took a dim view of his frailty. When he’d yelp with pain while managing the one step down into the kitchen, Bloom would exhort him with bluff English expressions like “Just get on with it!”—which at least were meant to encourage; once, while wretchedly recovering from food poisoning, he’d heard Anna call from the landing outside his bedroom door, “Is he still in there pissing and moaning?” “You’re in a POW camp,” Roth remembered telling himself, “and you have to take care of yourself.”

  He was visiting his father, in March 1987, when he went to see an orthopedist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York; the man informed him that his knee pain was due to a medial meniscus tear that could be fixed with arthroscopic surgery taking less than an hour. Ecstatic at the prospect of relief—the man promised he’d be “back to exercising in a couple of weeks”—Roth promptly scheduled the procedure, arranging to recuperate for a few days in a spare room at the Ashers’ on West Eighty-sixth. The operation, however, was not a success. On discovering that Roth’s meniscus was, in fact, wholly intact, the surgeon decided to shave a bit of frayed cartilage on his femoral condyle (a procedure the Times would debunk as “a sham” in a front-page article fifteen years later). When it was over, Roth’s knee was so swollen he could hardly pull his trousers back on, and the pain was more excruciating than ever. Within a week he was barely able to walk, even with crutches, and once again he was prescribed Halcion—which “should be shunned like cyanide” by anyone prone to depression, as Styron would write in 1993, the year the pill was banned in England because of adverse effects known as “Halcion madness.”

  In Doll’s House, Bloom remembered her first ominous glimpse of Roth on his return in late March—“grim and pale” in a wheelchair at Heath-row; for his part Roth remembered that she was angry with him for impugning her caretaking capacity by having his surgery in New York and relying on Linda and Aaron Asher afterward. Her first response to his suffering, as he saw it, was elaborate apathy: “As best I can understand,” he later wrote, “it was a way of denying that I was in physical trouble.” During a small dinner party they gave shortly after his return, Roth was in so much pain he had to excuse himself early in the evening and lie down upstairs with an ice bag on his knee; for hours he listened to Bloom chatting with their guests downstairs, but not once did she come up to check on him. “My career is over,” she cried, when he begged her to spend June with him in Connecticut. “I’ll have to spend the rest of my life caring for you.”

  On April 11, 1987, a couple of weeks after his return to London, Roth was contacted by the Times: Primo Levi had just killed himself; did he have any comment? Roth was horrified. Though Levi had confessed a measure of dejection over his stroke-paralyzed mother, he’d otherwise seemed nothing but “vivacious” and “sound” only a few months before. Apparently, though, he’d begun to despair after prostate surgery left him at least temporarily incontinent, and meanwhile he’d revisited his Auschwitz nightmare in the book he finished shortly before his death, The Drowned and the Saved. Servadio remembered Roth was weeping and distraught when he came to her house in Pimlico that day, and for a long time afterward he fought with his own thoughts of suicide.

  The last was among the most common symptoms of Halcion madness, along with a fear of being alone, both of which overwhelmed Roth when he returned that summer to Connecticut—where, as Bloom wrote, he “disintegrated before my eyes into a disoriented, terrified infant.” He clung to her, trembling, while they walked around the fields, and paddled around the pool with frantic slapping motions, begging her not to make him stay in the water. Conarroe visited in July and was struck by Bloom’s self-involvement (“It was all about her”) in the face of Roth’s desperation. “All hell broke loose late yesterday afternoon,” he wrote in his diary on July 20:

  P[hilip] has been increasingly despondent, probably in part because C[laire] is leaving for L.A. on Tuesday. When I walk over to the house at 6:30 they were in front, having come from the pool. C went in and P was left standing outside, looking dazed. When I asked if he was OK he broke into sobs and said he couldn’t take it any more. We went into the kitchen & when she came down he asked her to stay. The next half-hour or so involved a terrible discussion, C in tears, P speaking quietly, trying to convince her that he was doing the best he can & needs patience from her—just as she asked it from him. C in tears, is terrified about not being able to go home—“I’ll have nothing to look forward to.” It all ended with rhetoric, C weepily saying she hoped she’d get sick and [be] taken care of. . . .

  He spoke about his desire for oblivion—throwing himself out of the car, walking into Bantam Lake—and his utter sense of helplessness. Says if he goes back to London he’ll have a breakdown in his studio. Can’t stand the idea of the dinners with Anna. Expressed hurt that C, in London, & here, seems utterly insensitive to his situation. Sees himself as moving toward a breakdown with no place to turn—used the image of being in a maze & wherever he turns tears his flesh on nails. . . .

  Actually Bloom vacillated between a panicky concern for her own welfare and “over-emotional” (her term) impulses to help—such as her impetuous idea to sell the house on Fawcett Street and look for an apartment with no stairs for Roth to climb. Sensing he’d disapprove of such an “excessive” response to what one hoped was a temporary setback, she hadn’t told him, and indeed he was furious when he overheard her, in Connecticut, discussing the matter with a real estate agent over the phone. “I felt unfairly misunderstood and just started screaming,” she remembered, running into the fields and refusing to come back inside. Finally, after they’d both calmed down a bit, Roth suggested they invite a friend of his, Bernard Avishai, to come stay for a week. “I am convinced that Bernie saved Philip’s life,” Bloom wrote.

  Avishai had been twenty-five when he first met Roth, in 1974, around the time Avishai started writing about Israeli affairs for The New York Review of Books. When Bob Silvers asked him if there was anyone he wanted to meet in New York, Avishai named Roth (“half in jest”) and Silvers sent him forthwith to East Eighty-first Street; Roth gave the young man breakfast and listened to his life story—a grim tale about a mentally ill mother who died when Avishai was sixteen, a father who committed suicide five years later, etc. “Philip was tremendously empathic,” said Avishai. “I kept trying to steer the conversation to Jewish history, and he kept steering the conversation back to me.” Roth became a kind of older brother to Avishai, who shared his taste for Jewish shtick. “You do a courtesy flush?” Roth would call in a Yiddish accent when Avishai flushed the toilet, and the two also liked sharing titles for Jewish country and western songs: “I Balanced Your Books but You’re Breaking My Heart,” “The Second Time She Said Shalom I Knew She Meant Goodbye.”

  When Avishai arrived in Connecticut, he was scarcely prepared for the “frightening” degree of Roth’s deterioration. When the two were alone together, Roth confided that he was in unbearable pain and thinking incessantly of suicide, and Avishai asked him what pills he was taking. Roth mentioned a few, adding Halcion almost as an afterthought, whereupon Avishai phoned an MIT psychopharmacologist who’d helped him with his own benzodiazepine problem. The man directed Roth to stop taking the drug immediately, though cold-turkey withdrawal wasn’t easy (“the ordeal verges on being beyond description in its nearly unalleviated anguish,” Styron wrote); he told Roth to take a small dose of Valium the first night, a smaller dose the second, and none the third. Meanwhile Avishai would spend all three nights with Roth in a spare room with twin beds. “My first reaction was distrust,” Bloom wrote of the situation in Doll’s House. “I didn’t know Bernie well at the time, and was extremely protective of Philip.” “Malarkey,” Roth retorted. “Her unmistakable first reaction was anger, jealousy, and fear at believing herself to have been displaced by Bernie because of her inadequacies.” That was pretty much the way Avishai remembered it, too, though he thought it “natural” for Bloom to feel hurt. At any rate he mostly managed to stay awake with Roth for three long nights, while Roth “learned the meaning of ‘climbing the walls,’ ” as he later remarked.

  “I’ve had a helluva summer, the worst I can remember,” Roth wrote Kazin the day of Avishai’s departure, July 28. “I’m only just beginning to feel better, and tonight is the first night in four months that I’ve sat at my desk writing letters. I haven’t written a word of anything else.” The next day he and Bloom departed for a two-week visit with the Styrons on Martha’s Vineyard, where Roth began to feel a bit more like himself again. At a dinner party attended by Roth and other friends, Bob Brustein mentioned that Styron had recently sent him an old photograph of their children, Alexandra Styron (then age four) and Daniel Brustein (six), tied up back to back in chairs by Styron’s older son, Tommy; a TV repairman came to Brustein’s house, and the photo was missing after the man departed. Soon Brustein was visited by a couple of detectives who wanted to know if he enjoyed abusing children, and Brustein had to get the twenty-two-year-old Alexandra on the phone to attest to his innocence. “Innocent?!” Roth erupted. “Ohhh no . . .” He began cross-examining Brustein about his sex life (“the funniest thirty or forty minutes I’ve ever been involved in,” Brustein recalled), amid howling laughter from all the guests but one: “I look at Claire,” said Joanna Clark, “and she is turning paler and paler and paler.” Suddenly Bloom rushed outside, where she could be seen pacing about until Roth ended his spiel and joined her; the two stood remonstrating outside the window.