“Phil and Claire in crisis, according to Francine on the phone,” Conarroe wrote in his diary on August 18, 1988. The next day he recorded “a difficult phone conversation with Claire,” and decided he’d better take a bus to Connecticut and see what he could do. As Roth recalled of the episode, Bloom had begun crying almost as soon as she’d arrived at JFK that summer and continued, on and off, for two days. “Eventually I had to ask her—not that I didn’t know the answer—‘What is it? Why are you crying?’ She wanted to be in London, she told me. She wanted to be with her daughter.” This time Roth told her to go then; he’d leave the house while she packed her things, and return once she was gone for good. After he departed, Bloom ran “screaming” half a mile to some neighbors—Inga Larsen and her husband, in fact—who drove her to the Grays; Francine located Roth by phone at the Huvelles and asked if they could bring Claire over. Roth said either Absolutely not—as he claimed in a 1997 interview—or Yes (“influenced by the moderate, conciliatory Huvelles,” he later wrote); in any case Bloom came over, and, according to Roth, fell to her knees: “Clutching at my trousers, she said, ‘I beg you! I beseech you! I implore you! Don’t leave me, please!’ . . . ‘Get up,’ I told her, ‘stand up,’ but she wouldn’t until C. H. and I lifted her to her feet.” “Claire thought she was being evicted, but that got cleared up,” Conarroe wrote on August 21. “Easy bus ride back to N.Y.”

  Roth tried again to leave her the following summer—though it might have been a bit later: “Some weeks after [Herman’s] funeral I had a series of nightmares about my dead father,” he wrote in 2011, whereas in 1997, only eight years after the fact, Roth said the nightmares (and hence the contretemps described below) occurred before Herman’s death.* Why does it matter? Because it was either before or after Roth’s quintuple bypass surgery, in mid-August, that (as he recalled) Bloom “began to pummel [him] on the chest with her fists, shouting ‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’ ” while he thrashed and cried out in his sleep. Roth told a pretty consistent version of the story on various occasions, but only once did he claim that Bloom pummeled a chest that had recently been “sawed open with a bone saw.” Anyway the chest was pummeled, and a disgusted Roth spent the rest of the night at Conarroe’s apartment in the Village. After he’d been gone a few days, Bloom delivered a message via Conarroe that she wanted Roth to meet with her psychoanalyst. According to Roth, this woman explained to him, “Women don’t like weak men. If you’re sick just dial 911, and they’ll take care of you.” Enraged,† Roth returned to West Seventy-seventh and left a note on Bloom’s pillow—“Next time find a strong man”—then proceeded to Connecticut, where he stayed away for three weeks, determined never to return. “And still I went back,” he later wrote. “Shameful. The most shameful thing I’ve ever done. She cried, she begged, I jumped. I am a part of the history of ugly marriages that people have not had the fortitude to leave.” Though of course they weren’t actually married yet.

  There was also the problem of his most recent fiction, or whatever it was. After finishing The Facts—and tabling all he could write of Patrimony while Herman was still alive—Roth had felt “altogether stymied” in his work, what with living in a hotel and shuttling back and forth to New Jersey to care for his father. Finally, toward the end of 1988, he began a novel that he provisionally titled Ears because it was written almost entirely in dialogue (this in opposition to his previous rule whereby “all conversations should be summarized except the brilliant ones”): “I’ve gotten down to basics,” he told a friend: “ ‘I want to fuck you, shiksa.’ ‘Suck my cock.’ ”

  The novel was an even more explicit tribute to the euphonious delectability of Emma Smallwood, whose appearance as Maria in The Counter-life had caused a stir in Roth’s house. “You love Maria more than you love me,” Bloom had remarked, to which Roth had replied (in roughly the same words as “Philip” in Deception), “Of course I love Maria, she doesn’t exist—if you didn’t exist I’d love you too.” In the past he’d freely discussed his works in progress with Bloom—his “first reader,” he liked to say—but now he was tight-lipped to the point of furtiveness. One day Bloom rushed over to his studio on West Seventy-ninth to share a piece of good news she’d received in the mail, but Roth was so “cold, alarmed, and unwelcoming” that she abruptly and rather crossly departed.

  Twenty years before, while in London with Mudge, Roth had read his friend Julian Mitchell’s The Undiscovered Country—a novel partly narrated by a character named Julian who resembles the author. For Roth, this planted an idea about “raising the moral stakes” by making oneself, “Philip,” a “miscreant” in one’s own book—as it happened, the same approach adopted by some of his favorite later discoveries: Genet, Gombrowicz, and above all Céline, whose rabid anti-Semitism on the page was apt to make a reader forget that in real life he was also Dr. Destouches, humanely tending the wretched of Paris. Likewise Roth almost invariably made himself seem worse than he was. “Why not?” he wrote; “literature is not a moral beauty contest.” But of course—as Zuckerman points out in The Facts—Roth also liked to have it both ways, and was wont to remind the reader, in so many words, that “the most cunning form of disguise is to wear a mask that bears the image of one’s own face.”

  “Rightly or wrongly,” he later wrote, “there was something hazardous, I thought, in assigning the adulterer my own name and identity, and right off the bat Bloom proved me correct.” On September 25, 1989, Plante recorded in his diary that Roth had given him a typescript of Deception, which Plante stayed up reading that night; the next day he phoned Roth and said he “was very worried about Claire’s reaction.” Roth said he planned to let her read it over the weekend, and, if pressed, he’d simply repeat his previous alibi about Janet Hobhouse serving as the model for the English mistress; in any case he’d insist it was mostly invented. “Even if it is invented,” said Plante, “won’t Claire be humiliated by everyone’s assuming it’s the truth?” “She knows what it is to live with a writer,” Roth blithely replied. The following week Plante called again to ask whether Bloom had read the book. “No,” said Roth.

  But one morning, at last, he presented her with the typescript and left for his studio. Bloom would retrospectively give a garbled account of the novel, as if it were a vague compound of both The Counterlife and Deception. “Oh well,” she remembered thinking while reading the typescript, “he doesn’t like my family”—this apropos of the “self-hating, Anglo-Jewish family” with whom the hero lives in England, presumably Bloom’s faint recollection of Maria’s anti-Semitic family in The Counter-life, though of course the Freshfields are Christian. Bloom also mentioned the various “Eastern European seductresses” who come to Philip’s studio for sex, though the Philip of Deception only listens to these women, reserving his carnal energy for the one woman based on Emma. At any rate Bloom claimed to take the aforesaid in stride, but was outraged by Roth’s portrayal of “his remarkably uninteresting, middle-aged wife”—named Claire!—who is forever sobbing over his adultery with younger women. Roth himself would presently admit she was “perfectly right” to object to the use of her name. He hadn’t named the mistress, after all. (“Of course the English mistress has a name,” he playfully wrote Tom and Jacquie Rogers, “but do you think I’m going to blab it all over my book?”)

  Meanwhile, that day at his studio, Roth phoned his worldly friend Judith Thurman and explained his predicament; she told him to meet her at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-seventh, where Tiffany was on one corner and Bulgari on the other. At the latter Thurman directed him to buy a three-thousand-dollar serpent ring with an emerald head and diamond tail, and this he did without a moment’s protest.

  One of the first things he noticed, on returning to West Seventy-seventh, was his now vomit-stained typescript;‡ then Bloom emerged “like a wraith” (“I felt like Macbeth,” said Roth) and began straightaway berating him—though not, to his mild surprise, about the mistress(es) per se:§ “How dare you represent me as a bourgeois wife! How dare you represent me as a middle-class woman who would be concerned with adultery!” Roth thought back to the time she “nearly went out of her mind” on finding the maid’s note—“Christa called”—but let it go; he promptly agreed to remove her name from the book. She was still inconsolable, so he slipped away and put the little Bulgari box under her pillow in the bedroom. She resumed berating him when he came back, and finally he said, “Why don’t you go into the bedroom and see what’s under the pillow?” A few minutes passed, then she returned smiling with the ring on her finger: “Who cares about that book, anyway?”

  It was a momentary lull. In subsequent months she furiously buttonholed friends, and demanded the book’s dedicatee, Rieff, meet her for lunch. “Why didn’t you stop it?” she asked. When Rieff passed this along to Roth, he laughed and said, “I can’t even stop myself”—reminiscent of what “Philip” says to his lachrymose (but now anonymous) mate in Deception:

  “I write for a simple and ridiculous pathological reason—because I cannot stop myself! I write what I write the way I write it, and if and when it should ever happen, I will publish what I publish however I want to publish and I’m not going to start worrying at this late date what people misunderstand or get wrong!”

  “Or get right.”

  WITH DECEPTION, Simon & Schuster pulled out the stops to recoup its investment in Roth. The gleefully hyperbolic publicity campaign included a description of the novel as his “most original, poignant and provocative,” and naturally predicted it would have the same generation-defining impact as Portnoy’s Complaint. The cover of the February 1990 Esquire, where an excerpt appeared, featured a tousle-haired doxy wearing a negligee with one shoulder strap loose. “A famous writer has a mistress,” the caption read. “They meet in a room with no bed. They have sex. They tell lies. They play games with each other. Then he exposes it all in a book.” Will Blythe’s introduction commented on the “fine carpets, paintings,” and “monastic silence” of Roth’s Manhattan apartment, and quoted Roth on the subjects of what feminists would think of his novel (“They’ll probably hate it, but fuck ’em”) and how the magazine might go about pitching his excerpt: “ ‘Philip Roth calls his forthcoming novel Deception. But who can say how far the deception really goes? Is it actually a novel? Or is that the greatest deception?’ ” Such impolitic remarks had been made with the understanding that Roth would have a chance to vet the introduction in advance, and, when Esquire neglected to honor this agreement, Wylie grimly wrote the magazine’s editor, Lee Eisenberg, that Roth was “outraged” and would “not allow his work to appear in Esquire again.”

  “His chinless head, nearly bald now, sniffs atop the slender neck with all the indignant sternness of a tortoise testing unfriendly air,” Stephen Schiff generously evoked his subject for a Vanity Fair profile with which Roth had resignedly cooperated when his new publisher insisted. Schiff briskly dismissed the nominal occasion for the piece—Roth’s novel—as follows: “Precious, often tedious, and practically devoid of forward momentum . . . lightweight, almost vapid. And because it grazes themes Roth has already excavated to the depths, it gives off a stale air.” That done, he went on to quote an “old friend” who claimed Roth liked to behave rudely to “girls” at New York parties (Roth pointed out that he hadn’t been to a party with “girls”—in New York anyway—since sometime in the sixties), and, more accurately, that Bloom was rumored to be “upset about the way he’s purloined his private life for Deception.” (“There aren’t enough good things for me to say about them,” Roth remarked of Vanity Fair, which went on to publish an excerpt from Doll’s House about his 1993 stay at Silver Hill psychiatric hospital.)

  Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s valedictory appraisal of Roth’s work was a fittingly representative performance—fair-minded, full of padding quotes, and finally damning amid faint praise. Roth’s readers, he concluded, “must surely be growing impatient for the author to stop analyzing his imagination and start exercising it, if he hasn’t dissected it beyond repair by now.” Fay Weldon was kinder in The New York Times Book Review, noting that Deception had been published the same week as Thomas Pynchon’s more sprawling Vineland, and that she was happy to find herself “as exhilarated by one as by the other.” Between Vineland and the “neat-and-steely” Deception, she wrote, “range the works of all other writers in the English language.” She did, however, ding the author for being “rather old-fashioned about women” (“To flattery, to the power of the penis, the woman can only succumb”), and there was something of this, too, in Hermione Lee’s review for The New Republic. Lee had mostly approved of the novel as art, but was a little dismayed by Roth’s increasingly “reactionary” bent—the way he (or “Philip”) takes the usual potshots at “feminist objections to his exploitation of women, the xenophobia and the parochialism of suburban Britain, the anti-Semitism of the fashionable English left,” and permits little in the way of opposition. “ ‘I wouldn’t dare,’ ” his mistress says, when challenged to disagree. “Anyone who disagrees is stupid,” Lee glossed—a provocation Roth would rebut in his next novel, characterized by a cacophony of disagreement on all sides.

  Unlike his publisher, Roth was scarcely inclined to profess that Deception was his “most original” novel, but as a formal achievement he was mostly satisfied with it, and as ever he dismissed fiction-vs.-autobiography speculation as idle gossip. Perhaps his favorite endorsement came from Jonathan Brent’s father, Stuart, a legendary Chicago bookseller (whom Roth had known for many years and described as a cross between a “Chicago intellectual and Persian rug dealer”): “Deception is a love story that is not a love story, and therein lies the deception. Its real subject is not the wiles of illicit love affairs, but those of the serious novelist, whose material becomes real only as it becomes art. The result is not so much a comedy of manners as a play of magic mirrors—a conjuring performance which I believe you will find to be an utter delight.” Fair enough. In one of the novel’s few scenes that Roth (probably) made up out of whole cloth, Philip’s Czech friend Ivan—based on the director Jiří Weiss, whose much younger wife had left him after they immigrated to the States—accuses Philip of sleeping with his wife, and scoffs at his denials: “Even this you banally fictionalize. . . . Maybe you should have been a wonderful actor instead of a terrible novelist who will never understand the power of a narrative that remains latent.” This made-up scene about Ivan later enables Philip (in perhaps the only other scene that might be indisputably described as pure fiction) to argue convincingly vis-à-vis his jealous wife that everything else is made up too.

  For the most part, though, it suited Roth’s imp of the perverse (“what it adds up to, honey, is homo ludens!”) to be almost scrupulously accurate, in the novel, about even the most damning details of his actual life: “Three,” Philip specifies, when his mistress asks how many affairs he’s had with students—the same number that Roth (the real one) gave his biographer. “ ‘What was he like?’ ” asks Philip, pretending to be his own biographer. “ ‘A tall, thin man with a cheap watch,’ ” she replies. And that, too, was true.¶

  “ONCE YOU’VE REACHED a certain age and you’ve been married, and you don’t want children, what on earth is the point?” Bloom told People magazine in 1983. “Marriage gets vulgar after the second time.” For more than ten years, Bloom had all but sneered at those who wondered why she and Roth weren’t married (“We don’t need it”), but later, once they moved to America, she became quite adamant to the contrary. Suddenly, according to Roth, she claimed to feel “embarrassed and humiliated,” and wept bitter tears to prove it. In 2014—explaining why he’d married the two women he married, and didn’t marry more suitable partners such as Ann Mudge and Barbara Sproul—Roth said: “It was not for lack of love that I did not marry any of those women I did not marry who would have married me. I did not marry them because none was a finagler, a cheat, or a manipulator made tenacious by panic who would have her man no matter what.”

  On January 1, 1990, Bloom wrote Roth a letter asking him to marry her, then went away to London to appear in Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken; a meditative three weeks passed before she received Roth’s epistolary consent (“Dearest Actress, I love you. Will you marry me?”)—a moment, Bloom wrote in Doll’s House, of “radiant happiness.”

  “I’m going to have to marry her now,” Roth sighed to Thurman on the way to Bulgari. In her New Year’s Day letter, Bloom did her best to soften the blow, explaining simply that “it [was] time” after almost fifteen years together, and assuring him that she had no desire to take his money. As for their Deception controversy, she advanced the novel claim that what had really rankled was not “the silliness over the girls” but rather his mean comments about her “beloved country” (“STOP telling everyone how you hate London”). Finally there was the matter of her “wonderful” daughter: “For God’s sake cut the crap,” she wrote, entreating Roth to wish Anna a happy thirtieth birthday on February 13; it was time for everybody to be friends.