“Nationally Renowned Poet [sic] to Do Reading at Bucknell,” announced the nearby Williamsport Sun-Gazette of Roth’s April 1 appearance at Bucknell Hall, where the poetry library and lounge had recently been renamed in honor of his mentor. In his reading script, Roth had carefully scribbled “who’s sitting right there” (reminding himself to point at her), above the line where he declared the evening was “dedicated to [his] teacher and friend, Professor Mildred Martin.” His reading was a radical abridgment of Patrimony—from the discovery of Herman’s tumor all the way to the end—and Roth left nothing to chance, practicing for weeks on end and constantly adding little directions with his red Flair pen: “beat / beat / beat” he scribbled above the phrase “could not stop,” as in “Eating was [Lillian’s] only revenge, and like the tumor, it was something he could not stop, no matter how he railed against it”; every so often, too, he noted in margins exactly how much time should have elapsed. His labor paid off: the readings, performed at some twenty venues over the next two years, were a hit—but none so much as that first reading before a standing-room-only crowd plus Miss Martin in the front row. “You made it! You made it!” Roth excitedly muttered to himself afterward, wandering the streets of Lewisburg. He would always consider it one of the great nights of his life.

  IN RECENT YEARS, Roth’s affair with Inga Larsen had tapered off with the worsening of her alcoholism, which she’d mostly managed to conceal from him. On January 6, 1991, Inga entered a twenty-eight-day recovery program in Minnesota; a day or two before leaving, she phoned Roth and told him she was an alcoholic. “After beeing [sic] reassured that it did not involve you in any way,” she rather pointedly reminded him twenty-one months later, “you were very supportive of me.” Later Roth put her in touch with his AA friend Joanna Clark, and the two attended meetings together.

  Once Inga got sober, her affair with Roth flourished—became less about hijinks and more of a bona fide romance. Her nightly AA meetings provided the perfect cover for trysts: after dinner with her family, she’d stay at a meeting just long enough to steep herself in cigarette smoke, then head to Roth’s house for two or three carefree hours. Bloom’s occasional visits to the country were brightened as a result. As Roth observed, “Adultery makes numerous bad marriages bearable and holds them together and in some cases can make the adulterer a far more decent husband or wife than . . . the domestic situation warrants. (See Madame Bovary for a pitiless critique of this phenomenon.)” Certainly everyone agreed that Roth behaved like a model husband on the occasion of Bloom’s sixty-second birthday (February 15, 1993), putting their friends up at a local inn and hosting a celebratory dinner at their favorite restaurant, the West Street Grill in Litchfield, where Roth gave a loving toast that moved his wife to tears. C. H. Huvelle assured him afterward that the evening had been “a smash hit” (“it was particularly kind of you to seat [Inga’s] mother at your side”), and reminded him that they were getting ready for “the next Big One”: Roth’s sixtieth birthday party, chez Huvelle, the following month. Inga and her husband were cohosts, and while setting up for the party she came tottering in with a flamboyant bouquet of sixty roses. Huvelle—the only person (other than Sandy, Thurman, and Ross Miller) who knew about her affair with Philip—took Inga aside and admonished her to make the roses a gift from her mother and oldest daughter instead, as she did.

  Joel Conarroe stood before the twenty-two guests as emcee, reading aloud letters from absent friends, including a telegram from the goyish Updike that, in fact, Conarroe had composed himself: “Masel gov, you alte cocker. Much nachos on this glorious yuntuva to you and your mishpocha. Zei gesunt.” Inga’s husband and Francine Gray gave heartfelt toasts, and Bloom read some love sonnets from Shakespeare. Then Roth rose, and—trying not to grimace from a fearful spell of back pain—gave a speech that Plante described in his diary as “funny and tender.” Finally the guests were entertained by a wonderful young magician Roth had discovered at the Pump Room in Chicago.

  “Can I quit now?” Roth wrote Miss Martin after finishing his latest novel, Operation Shylock, which had caused the author “more misery than all the other books combined.” Almost every morning for three years he’d flipped through the cards of his alphabet frieze—the capital A, the small a; the capital B, the small b—reciting such incantations as “Words, words, words” and “I’m free, I’m nineteen, I’m unpublished, I can write what I want.” Also he reminded himself with an emphatic, all-caps memo: “DO NOT JUDGE IT / DO NOT TRY TO UNDERSTAND IT. / DO NOT CENSOR IT.” The result of such persistent hectoring, he hoped, would be his masterpiece, and no less than the canonizing sage of Yale, Harold Bloom, seemed to bear him out: “The largest praise is that Operation Shylock for me matches Gravity’s Rainbow,” Bloom wrote him, after reading an all-but-final draft in August 1992. “They are the two American fictions of the last generation or so that, for me, share canonical place with Merrill and Ashbery among the poets.” Cynthia Ozick went even further, proclaiming Roth to be a “divine manifestation” before whom she went down “on [her] knees”: “In the Ultimate Library, they’ll put you somewhere between Dostoyevsky and Mark Twain.”

  For Shylock, Roth plunged almost giddily into the publicity campaign prescribed by his deep-pocketed publisher, all the more since he genuinely believed the book deserved a big sale and that it would make Roger Straus look bad. Moreover his imp of the perverse had dictated that he pretend this time, even to Simon & Schuster, that the novel’s account of his becoming a Mossad agent (etc.) was, indeed, a true “Confession” as per the book’s subtitle: “You know from our conversations—and, of course, from the book itself—that I believe Operation Shylock to be as accurate a report as I could write of my experiences in Israel in 1988,” he wrote his editor, Michael Korda.

  On the other hand, the Mossad has requested, for reasons of its own, that I publish the book as fiction. I think you know by now all my reasons for deciding to do as they wish. I hope that you and Simon and Schuster will do everything to facilitate my decision. The almighty Israeli intelligence service is not an agency that either you or I would want to treat capriciously.

  Simon & Schuster seemed a little befuddled by things: the book was duly classified as fiction when the first wave of review copies went out in January, then changed to nonfiction when Roth kept publicly declaring it had really happened. Library Journal reviewed it as fiction, but added a disclaimer: “Roth reported in The New York Times, March 9, 1993, that all events depicted in this book are in fact true but that the Mossad insisted that he bill it as fiction.—Ed.” In the Times Roth had pleasantly complained, hardly for the first time, that people were forever convinced he’d been writing about himself in Portnoy and the Zuckerman novels: “And now when I tell the truth, they all insist that I made it up. I tell them, ‘Well, how can I make it up since you’ve always said I am incapable of making anything up?’ I can’t win!” He even agreed to cooperate with a BBC documentary, his first TV appearance since his WNET interview in 1966: “he has broken his long silence to set at least some of the record straight about his life, his books, and the links between the two.” The documentary featured commentary from the likes of Bellow and Kazin, while a poker-faced Roth more or less accurately discussed his life, and finally repeated the claim that his “Mossad supervisor” had forced him to label his latest work as fiction. Kazin—in the privacy of his diary, at least—took a dim view of such shenanigans, dourly recording his wife’s observation at the breakfast table: “Can you imagine Kafka selling himself like this?”

  Since people liked to read Roth’s novels as autobiography, Roth believed his fiction was an essential part of his life story: “AGAINST ITSELF / The Autobiography of an Antithesis,” he’d intended to title his final (since he earnestly wished to retire) magnum opus, a multivalent self-portrait that would bring together his last four books in a single volume: “Part One / The Facts, a Novelist’s Autobiography / Part Two / Deception, a Novel / Part Three / Patrimony, a True Story / Part Four / Operation Shylock, a Confession.” Such a concerted muddle was not an idle conceit to Roth. In 1998, an obscure writer named Richard Elman—sometimes confused with the great Joyce biographer, Richard Ellmann, a friend of Roth—would admit in his book Namedropping that he’d once met “a certain well-known screen actress” who, to his surprise, had agreed to go home with him and have wild, all-night sex. “Oh come on,” she said the next morning, when he wondered why she kept calling him Phil, “I’d recognize you anywhere, Phil Roth. I loved every minute of Portnoy.” Reading this, the real Phil Roth realized that a couple of strange actresses he’d once seen on The Tonight Show—tittering about what a “sexual madman” he was—may well have been talking about Elman or some Elman-like person; the same possibility had occurred to him re any number of tabloid stories from the Portnoy era (“Barbra Streisand has no complaints”). The idea of a doppelganger leading a life “that has nothing to do with your life” moved Roth to conceive of the other “Philip Roth” in Shylock, whom he dubbed Moishe Pipik—Moses Bellybutton—after the imp invoked by his aunts and uncles whenever he said or did something endearingly ridiculous as a boy: “the little guy who wants to be a big shot, the kid who pisses in his pants, the comical shadow alongside whom we had all grown up.”

  “It’s Zuckerman,” Roth thinks, in the novel, when his (fictional) cousin Apter first informs him of his double’s presence in Israel, “it’s Kepesh, it’s Tarnopol and Portnoy—it’s all of them in one, broken free of print and mockingly reconstituted as a single satirical facsimile of me.” What Pipik purports to be, vis-à-vis the “real” Roth, is “THE YOU THAT IS NOT WORDS”: to wit, a private detective from Chicago, also named Philip Roth, who is dying from cancer but determined to enact his concept of “Diasporism”—a plan to avert a second Holocaust in the Middle East by returning European Jews to their original homelands; once the population of Israel is thereby halved, Pipik explains, “then the state can be reduced to its 1948 borders, the army can be demobilized, and those Jews who have lived in an Islamic cultural matrix for centuries can continue to do so, independently, autonomously, but in peace and harmony with their Arab neighbors.” This strikes the real Roth as “the final solution of the Jewish problem for Yasser Arafat,” and indeed he finds a receptive audience for Diasporism in his old university friend, George Ziad, a Palestinian who’s filled with rage against the Israeli occupiers. Roth, pretending to be his own double, explains to Ziad that he “got the idea” for Diasporism from Irving Berlin: “God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Irving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! . . . He turns their religion into schlock. But nicely!” Despite his perverse performance for Ziad, the real Roth is only too aware that it would take more than Irving Berlin to rid Christianity of its Jew hatred: “Diasporism is a plot for a Marx Brothers movie,” he says; never mind how Diasporist evacuees would be received in “bigoted, backwater, pope-ridden Poland”—or Germany, Romania, Ukraine, et al.—Roth wants “to see with [his] very own eyes the welcoming committee of English Goyim waiting on the platform with their champagne. ‘They’re here! More Jews! Jolly good!’ ”

  That Jews may not meet with ecstatic receptions from their Christian countrymen is a problem Pipik claims to address with an organization designed to purge the world of anti-Semitism: Anti-Semites Anonymous. One of Pipik’s “workout tapes” for one of their meetings, however, is titled “Did the Six Million Really Die?”: a long rant (almost six pages of fine print) blaming the partial extinction of European Jews on “the breakdown of the German supply system at the end of the war” and outbreaks of scurvy and typhus in the camps—this versus the Jewperpetuated hoax (as Pipik would have it) of “Holocaustomania.” “Man, how can you not be anti-Semitic?” he concludes. “When you see them they’re all on the fucking telephone, manipulating. For better jobs. Or helping their friends.” Thus Roth comes to suggest that his closest double is not a sinister anti-Semite like Pipik, but the immortal villain evoked by the greatest writer in English—the “hook-nosed moneylender,” Shylock, the archetypal Jew throughout the ages in Europe: “the Jew expelled in 1290 by the English, the Jew banished in 1492 by the Spanish, the Jew terrorized by Poles, butchered by Russians, incinerated by Germans, spurned by the British and the Americans while the furnaces roared at Treblinka.”

  Stationed at the entrance of the Treblinka gas chamber was a notorious guard, Ivan the Terrible—beating his victims with pipes, gutting them with a sword—who may or may not be the “hardworking, churchgoing family man” from Cleveland, John Demjanjuk, ostensibly Ivan’s polar opposite. Roth and Pipik, too, seem to have little in common except name and physical resemblance (“he looked like the after to my before in the plastic surgeon’s advertisement”), and Roth wonders whether Pipik got the idea for appropriating his identity from watching this man’s trial. Meanwhile Roth—of all people—knows that a single human being can accommodate drastic contradictions, and hence can easily imagine that the harmless-looking oaf seated in the dock may well be the same man who tortured multitudes at Treblinka:

  What a job! A sensational blowout every day! One continuous party! Blood! Vodka! Women! Death! Power! And the screams! . . . A year, a year and a half of that is just enough to satisfy a man forever; after that a man need never complain that life had passed him by; after that anyone could be content with a routine, regular nine-to-five job where no blood ever really flowed except, on rare occasions, as a result of an accident on the factory floor.

  And hence, too, the duality at the heart of modern Israel: throughout the novel the historical suffering of the Jewish people is balanced against Israel’s brutality toward the Palestinians, the whole seething conflict coming to a head at last, it seems, with the Intifada. And Roth’s own ambivalence is reflected in the stridency of voices on every side. So determined is he, indeed, to let every conceivable side of the argument be heard at lovingly nuanced length that he overindulges an old tendency described by Kazin as “the aria bit”: monologues that go on and on until merely recreational readers are apt to collect their things and head for the exits. Since Ziad and others are given abundant opportunity to vilify Israel, countervailing voices are perforce given equal time: that of the wheelchair-bound martyr Leon Klinghoffer, for instance—murdered by the PLO aboard the cruise ship Achille Lauro—whose laughably dull diary fills four fine-print pages, often beginning with a gloss on the weather. No wonder even some of Roth’s most incisive admirers tend to be a little reluctant to revisit Shylock as elective reading. “I can see it’s a dazzling piece of work,” said Hermione Lee, “but I feel like Keats sitting down to read King Lear again.” She laughed. “Must I again?”

  Roth was in San Francisco (for a Patrimony reading) when Bloom rushed to their hotel room to show him an early Time review that seemed to augur great things: “Roth has not riffed with quite this comic abandon since Portnoy’s Complaint. And the social and historical range of Operation Shylock is broader than anything the author has attempted before.” By the time Roth returned east, however, a slew of more damning reviews had followed, including what would prove the first of many brickbats wielded by Kakutani of the Times: The comedy and sociopolitical commentary of Roth’s novel, she wrote, were “subsumed” and “overshadowed” (both) “by the author’s tiresome games with mirrors.”

  An even nastier shock lay ahead. There was a time when Updike had hesitated to review his “American contemporaries” because, as he explained to Aaron Asher (in the course of declining to review The Professor of Desire), “Envy pulls one way, and friendship (in many cases, including this) another.” But soon enough he let go of this scruple. Bellow was thinking of Updike’s canny disparagements when he referred to “the fastidious goy critics on guard for the Protestant establishment and the genteel tradition,” whereas Roth, less thin-skinned, had remarked in print that Updike’s mixed review of The Anatomy Lesson was “first class,” and he’d also professed to be satisfied with the man’s even pricklier assessment of The Counterlife. As for Roth’s view of Updike’s work, he could scarcely have been more generous; though disinclined to write much in the way of formal criticism, he made a point of dropping Updike a letter of considered praise for almost every new novel, not least the recent Rabbit at Rest: “You’re the master of Joyce’s great modern trick,” he wrote, “—what Lewis, O’Hara, and Dreiser didn’t dare to do: join the social position and vernacular of a Leopold-Rabbit to the perceiving mentality of a Joyce-Updike.” Quite properly this struck Updike as “a lovely act of readership,” and left him feeling all the more chastened for his less charitable (and more public) treatment of Roth: “what a niggle-mouthed slyly hedging critic I am in comparison.”

  Alas, there was nothing sly or hedging about Updike’s abuse of Shylock in the March 15, 1993, New Yorker. “Some readers may feel there has been too much Philip Roth in the writer’s recent books,” he announced at the outset. “Such readers should be warned: there are two Philip Roths in his new novel.” It went downhill from there. “It’s hard to wrap your mind around this paragon,” Updike wrote of “Philip I”—that is, the author’s persona in the novel—whose supporting cast appears to be in a competition to praise him, from Pipik’s “slavish flattery” to Ziad’s, Jinx Possesski’s, and Smilesburger’s remarks about his independence, leadership, and literary achievement respectively. “Somewhere after Philip I sleeps with Jinx, the novel stops pretending to coherence and becomes a dumping ground, it seems, for everything in Roth’s copious file on Jewishness.” Picking one’s way over this landfill was, for Updike, an “exhausting” affair: Roth’s characters talk and talk “until their mouths bleed,” and there are too many of them (“they keep dropping out of sight, and when they reappear they don’t talk the same”). Casting about for a positive note to end on, Updike commended his colleague’s “artistic energy” withal, suggesting the novel was de rigueur for “anyone who cares about (1) Israel and its repercussions; (2) the development of the postmodern novel; (3) Philip Roth.”