FOR A FEW YEARS Roth’s isolation was mitigated by Julia Golier’s company on weekends. Friday evenings she’d take a train to Wingdale, New York—stopping opposite a deserted asylum, the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center—where she was met by an elderly Warren neighbor, Mr. Beecher, who’d drive her the half hour to Roth’s house. A dinner of broiled fish, corn, and tomatoes was usually waiting. During her visits Golier would plug away at grant applications on her laptop while Roth worked in his studio, followed by an afternoon swim, another fish dinner, and maybe a few games of cards.

  Roth looked forward to celebrating Thanksgiving dans le vrai—that is, with Golier’s big Catholic family in Montvale, New Jersey. Golier’s mother, Mary Lou, had tried reading Portnoy when it was first published, but had to quit about halfway in. “If I ever thought I would have a daughter who would be in touch with him, I don’t know what I would have done,” she said. But right away she was disarmed. Roth arrived with flowers, effusively praised the food, and made a point of accepting pumpkin pie despite his rigid diet. “It was a little bit of Bucknell again,” he said, remembering the time Golier’s father had asked him to say grace: “ ‘I’m not a religious man,’ ” Roth quoted the Swede, “ ‘but when I look around this table, I know that something is shining down on me.’ ”

  By the time she was thirty-five or so, Golier wanted to marry and start a family—with Roth, preferably, who “thought very seriously” about it but finally declined, given his advanced age and “crushingly unsuccessful” marital history. The end was terrible for both of them (“I cried for a week,” said Golier), but a loving friendship endured. In the years before Golier’s marriage, in 2002, Roth often called to commiserate about her grueling ordeal of dating strange men, and meanwhile they continued to meet for dinners, movies, and concerts, even taking trips together; eventually Roth named her the co-executor of his estate.*

  Once Golier was gone, as Roth put it, “exercise took the place of companionship.” He went on long walks, even in freezing weather, and looked forward to his thrice-weekly meetings with a personal trainer, who helped him regain the strength he’d lost during his long siege of back pain in the early nineties. He also hired a caretaker and long-distance driver, Peter Carberry. Once, while cleaning out the attic, Roth directed Carberry to take one of his old IBM Selectrics to the dump, but Carberry suggested Roth autograph it and let Carberry try selling it on eBay, splitting the proceeds. Roth signed it above the keys with a Sharpie and gave it to Carberry on the condition he put the money aside for his daughter’s education.†

  Roth’s retainers also included Kathy Meetz, his cleaner since 1990, who usually arrived around nine, when he was finishing his stretching routine before heading out to his studio. A bit of cordial banter was de rigueur. Once, Meetz mentioned that Francine Gray had interviewed her for a job. If hired, Meetz wondered, would she have to wear a uniform like Gray’s cook? Roth urged her to do some spying for him chez Gray, then affected to have second thoughts (“She’s too provincial for you”). In some such context he also remarked how nice it would be “to sit on a riverbank and watch all the dead bodies of [my] enemies floating by.”

  Roth was a kindly but demanding employer, who often left monitory notes for Meetz: “THERE IS LOTS OF DUST EVERYWHERE,” he wrote on returning from a weekend in New York. “Dust all surfaces, including base of lamps, rungs of chairs, etc. . . . There is a very fine dust there [floor] that has to be mopped up. But don’t use anything on the floors with a strong smell.” Meetz cherished one note, from 1997, that tallied the usual delinquencies before ending “OTHERWISE THE HOUSE IS SPLENDID!” She was keenly aware that Roth’s life, post-Golier, had become almost morbidly lonely, and once encouraged him to inquire about a sign he’d seen—“Kittens for Sale”—over the receptionist’s desk at an ophthalmologist’s office in Torrington. As Roth recalled, he picked out two “enchanting orange things” from a litter of six, and over the weekend did little more than watch them play. On Monday he asked Meetz to return them. As Zuckerman remarks to his friend Larry Hollis, who presses two orange kittens on the solitary writer in Exit Ghost, “They’re too delightful.”

  OTHER THAN HIS TRAINER, Roth’s only occasional companion in Litchfield County was C. H. Huvelle—“the loving, accepting, complicitous grown-up,” as Thurman described him, a “father figure” seventeen years older than Roth. Back when Huvelle was his regular physician, Roth used to envy the doting daily esteem he elicited from patients in his waiting room. “Nobody smiles at me when I walk into my studio in the morning,” Roth told him. “Nobody eagerly looks up and reverentially says to me, ‘Good morning, Writer, good morning, Dr. Roth.’ ” Huvelle retired in 1983—a year after he first detected Roth’s coronary artery disease—because cataracts and retinal detachments had left him nearly blind. “I will be delighted to continue my professional services to you (and to Claire),”‡ he wrote Roth at the time, “as long as I know that Victor”—Hurst, Roth’s cardiologist then—“is in the firehouse ready to respond if I pull the alarm.”

  During the summer of 1993, a month or so before he went to Silver Hill, Roth conceived the idea of writing a biographical essay about his friend—something of a pretext, he wrote, “to keep myself from drowning by putting myself at the service of this wonderfully reasonable and amiable man and just being in his company a few times a week.” On these mornings, Roth would walk the cheerful streets of Litchfield until it was time to sit with Huvelle in his backyard arbor and discuss the man’s days in the army, in medical school, and so forth; finally Roth would turn off his tape recorder and return to his own woes: “C. H., what should I do about Claire? I don’t know what to do. She’s not with me when I need her, and when she is with me, she’s no use. I’m going under. . . .” Dr. Huvelle: A Biographical Sketch was written in the weeks after Silver Hill, while Roth was still picking around the threads of Sabbath’s Theater; in October he took the manuscript to a Litchfield County print shop and ordered seventy-five copies of a thirty-four-page booklet, which began with a telling anecdote from Huvelle’s childhood, when he’d ignored his father’s admonition to stop sucking a penny and ended up swallowing it: “He had to defecate in a potty until the penny appeared. When it came out, the boy cleaned it and saved it. . . . The seeds of independence.” Roth placed copies with the Litchfield Historical Society, the local library, and his archive at the Library of Congress, giving the rest to the Huvelles and their friends.

  “Philip called,” Conarroe wrote in his diary on June 22, 2000. “C. H. died. Said he couldn’t go into detail or he’d cry.” He saved the main detail for his novel The Dying Animal: like Kepesh’s friend George O’Hearn, the barely conscious Huvelle had friends and family come to his bedside, one by one, and say goodbye; when his wife, Bab, appeared, “he began rather frantically to undo the buttons on her blouse,” Roth remembered (“Wonder who he thought I was,” the wife of the more goatish O’Hearn remarks afterward). For Huvelle’s funeral at the Litchfield Congregational Church—where Lyman Beecher, the stern Calvinist father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, used to preach—Roth read a few passages from his biographical essay, ending with a quote from the subject: “ ‘If I die tonight, I’ve had a damn good life.’ ” Roth was told the minister winced; at any rate the man avoided Roth at the reception afterward.

  AFTER THE BLOOM FIASCO, said Bernie Avishai, “Philip desperately needed men in his life who he thought were on his side and he could count on to take care of him in certain ways that he increasingly thought women couldn’t.” One such man was Jonathan Brent, who’d met Roth in 1983 when he interviewed him for the Chicago Tribune. Brent was then teaching at Northwestern and running its university press; he told Roth about a journal he was starting, Formations, specializing in Eastern European literature, and Roth took it upon himself to solicit donations of a few hundred dollars apiece from a diverse roster of writers, including Updike, Mario Puzo, Toni Morrison, and Leon Uris. “He’s a brilliant fellow and a good man,” Roth said of Brent many years later, “and I wish we hadn’t lost touch.”

  They lost touch roughly ten years after Brent’s move, in 1991, to Yale University Press—hitherto a time of increasingly close friendship between the two, post-Bloom, when they’d meet for dinner every other month or so (sometimes with Ross Miller in tow) at a midway point between Warren and New Haven, Heritage Village in Southbury, a genteel retirement community that happened to have a good restaurant.§ Brent was going through a bad patch in his marriage: for years he’d been frustrated in his writing projects (a novel and a book about Stalin) because of onerous family obligations; indeed he’d felt thwarted for most of his adult life, since he’d married right out of college and now had two children to support besides. Characteristically Roth advised him to strike out on his own and focus on his writing; he even managed to cajole Brent into consulting a divorce lawyer, but when it came to a point the younger man couldn’t go through with it. He loved his wife and children too much, and besides he felt “afraid of Philip emotionally”—that is, Roth’s interest in him seemed a little “voyeuristic,” and also, on some level, he sensed Roth wanted him to get a divorce so he’d become more dependent on Roth (“Philip wants me to do this for him, not for myself,” he thought). On June 29, 2000, Roth registered his irritation about Brent’s change of heart with a little note to himself: “ ‘It would be a meaningful and beautiful experience for her.’ Where did he get this language? From her? Needs the compensating sentimentality for the aggression against the wife. Now the divorce is off.”

  The friendship might have survived if Roth had confined his irritation to notes, but instead he worked things out by lampooning Brent in The Dying Animal as Kepesh’s timid, self-righteous son, Kenny, who stays in a bad marriage despite his father’s well-meaning advice: “As for conjugal sex, a heinous duty he stoically performs, that is beyond even his fortitude now. Arguments abound, irritable bowel syndrome abounds, placations abound, threats abound, as do counter-threats. But when I ask, ‘Then why not leave?’ he tells me that leaving would destroy his family.” Lest there be any uncertainty on the point, Roth freely admitted to Brent that he’d used him as Kenny in the book (with the usual caveat that fiction is fiction, etc.), whereupon “at some stupid moment” Brent confided things to his wife, whose reaction may be imagined.

  Afterward, relations with Roth were “very tepid at best,” though Brent couldn’t help feeling a little relieved. “He needed more emotionally from me than I could deliver,” he said, some fourteen years later. “I don’t know how else to put this: He needs somebody who can truly love him—that’s why he’s lost. Because he lives in kind of an empty world. Not intellectually empty; not artistically empty; but in some deep psychic way. And it’s an emptiness that he has cultivated very carefully. Because he can control that world. But it leaves him empty and I think he’s in great need of real love that he can’t find.” Other friends have groped their way toward similar observations. “I think there’s something in his makeup he’s missing,” said Julius Goldstein in 1996. “I don’t know who his close friends are, really.” And when Roth marveled—deploringly—over the long duration of Alain Finkielkraut’s marriage, it occurred to Finkielkraut that he and Roth didn’t really understand each other and perhaps never would: “He doesn’t know much about my life—my private life, my books . . . I guess I am useful, but why?” Finkielkraut paused, then said to his interviewer: “You should ask him.”

  IN 1998, Roth’s blood pressure shot up and couldn’t be controlled with the usual medication; after a month of testing, an occlusion was found in his renal artery and the first of Roth’s many stents was inserted. Soon he got another stent in his left carotid artery, and in 2000 his cardiac surgeon, Jeffrey Moses, inserted a stent in Roth’s LAD artery—during which he discovered that, at some point, an obstructed graft had caused a silent heart attack on the posterior wall, permanently damaging the muscle. As Roth pointed out, Ross Miller—by then Roth’s health care proxy and vice versa—“never failed” him throughout these ordeals and the many to come.

  “I’ve had a bumper year,” Roth wrote his friend on October 24, 2000, enclosing a check for ten thousand dollars. “I want you to share in the general prosperity.” By then the two had become all but inseparable. Jack Miles remembered sitting in Roth’s studio while Roth and Miller chatted on the phone—about nothing, really; the Mets maybe—and noting Roth’s perfect laughing ease: “They’d spoken earlier in the day and they would speak again later in the day,” said Miles. “It was like a marriage, I thought.” After years of friction with Bloom and others, it was bliss talking with a like-minded chum about “boys stuff”—baseball and books, yes, but especially women—minus the kind of inhibition that marred his camaraderie with long-married friends like Finkielkraut and Michael Herr. As Zuckerman reflects in The Human Stain, “the male friendship is incomplete” if one can’t speak openly about sex: “Most men never find such a friend. . . . But when it does happen, when two men find themselves in agreement about this essential part of being a man, unafraid of being judged, shamed, envied, or outdone, confident of not having the confidence betrayed, their human connection can be very strong and an unexpected intimacy results.” Such a friend, for a while, was Ross Miller.

  Another of Miller’s assets (as Roth saw it) was that he was undaunted by Roth’s fame because he himself, after all, was the nephew of Arthur Miller—that is, he was “inured” to fame, as opposed to being (as others saw it) galled by it, and pathologically envious of those who possessed it. At the height of their friendship, anyway, Miller seemed mostly requited by his status as boon companion to one of the world’s greatest writers. “Don’t think I’m second banana,” he startled Hermione Lee, when she came to visit Roth in the hospital. Indeed, Miller considered himself to be Roth’s intellectual equal (he said as much)—resembling, in this respect, the manqué Gersbach in Herzog: “Did Valentine Gersbach ever admit ignorance of any matter? He was a regular Goethe. He finished all your sentences, rephrased all your thoughts, explained everything.” Conarroe, for one, never forgot the time he bumped into Miller during the intermission of a Dame Edna show, whereupon Miller proceeded to give a lecture on the nuances of camp to him, a gay professor. As for Miller’s own attempts at humor, they were mostly aimed to please an audience of one—Roth—who was easily tickled by a bawdy bon mot, man to man, though not so much when Miller, say, conspicuously feigned sleep at Roth’s table, during a public ceremony, while a boring dinner speaker went on too long praising Roth. “It’s my third bad marriage,” said Roth, in 2012, of the friendship. “I should have been put in jail when I was twenty, and locked up until I was seventy. That way I couldn’t have done any harm. I don’t mean harm to the community, I mean harm to myself.”

  MILLER WAS ALWAYS at his best, Roth thought, during their annual summer “pilgrimage” to the Bellows in Vermont. The two friends plus the Maneas would take rooms at the White House Inn in nearby Wilmington, and, for three or four days, devote themselves to amusing Bellow, who, again, had managed in the fullness of time to become well-disposed toward Roth, and who’d always had a soft spot for “lesser lights” like Miller—a point made by at least two of his biographers, James Atlas and Zachary Leader: “According to [Anthony] Hecht,” noted the latter, “ ‘Saul was always a sucker for flattery, and Jack’ ”—Ludwig, model for the treacherous Gersbach—“ ‘would lay it on with a trowel.’ ”

  Some of Janis Bellow’s “happiest memories” were of these visits in the late nineties, when her husband was in his eighties but still lively enough to enjoy all-day excursions such as a boat trip along the Connecticut River. He and Roth would sit at a table together, their heads almost touching, and occasionally Bellow would throw his head back and laugh, which suggested they were off the subject of books and into more personal territory. (“Saul, how could you marry five women?” “I don’t ask myself those questions any longer.”)

  It was Roth who, twelve years earlier, had suggested to James Atlas that he write a biography of Bellow. He and Atlas had become friends in 1977, when Roth read the twenty-eight-year-old Atlas’s first biography and wrote one of his nicely considered fan letters:

  I’ve just finished reading your book on Delmore Schwartz and am still under its spell. It’s an agonizing story, but you present it with such tact and clarity that finally—though I know it doesn’t lessen his agony any—it at least comforts the reader knowing that someone has contemplated that life in its entirety and given its due. It is a beautiful act of sympathy and understanding.

  Atlas was overwhelmed—Roth was one of his idols—and for the next few days he wrote a long, rather tortured letter of gratitude (“thousands of words”), until his wife, Anna Fels, advised him simply to say, in effect, “Thank you. Your letter meant a lot to me.” Sensing he’d found another ideal reader, Roth invited the young man to Warren and gave him a draft of The Ghost Writer. Their subsequent discussion, he wrote Atlas, proved to be “of enormous value”: “you are someone after my own heart, you know, because you do your homework, and it was clear you had done it for me with my manuscript.”

  A decade later Atlas was at sea. After five years of fitful labor, he’d decided to abort his biography of Edmund Wilson because of a “toxic response to his character” (“I warned you about that,” said Roth), and also he’d left his job at The New York Times. Over lunch at the Russian Tea Room (so Atlas recorded in his journal), Roth “launched into a stunningly eloquent analysis of the decisions I’d made,” meanwhile assuring Atlas that he’d soon find another project to his liking—namely Bellow, “a natural choice” for Atlas. “I had grown up in Chicago; my parents were from the same Northwest Side Jewish milieu that Bellow had rendered so vividly in a succession of books”; also, Bellow had been a great friend of Delmore Schwartz (model for Von Humboldt Fleisher in Humboldt’s Gift) and naturally partook of the same cultural ethos. In 1992, Roth helped things along by recommending Atlas for a Guggenheim, and, on getting word from Conarroe (then the foundation’s president), Roth phoned Atlas one Sunday morning with the good news (“so I don’t learn like other normal people do; I learn from Philip Roth”). At times, though, Roth could be a cagey benefactor. The two were neighbors on West Seventy-seventh and would occasionally bump into each other—encounters that tended to make Atlas a little fretful. Once Roth invited him up to his apartment and left him alone in a room where Atlas spied, on a chair, a letter from Bellow; “You’ve probably already Xeroxed it,” Roth said on returning, but didn’t show it to him or discuss its contents. “As for Atlas’s biography of Bellow,” Roth wrote Ted Hoagland around this time, “I reserve judgment.”