Wylie passed this missive along to Roth, who indignantly prepared a long memo on which Wylie was to base his reply. He pointed out that he’d FedExed a letter to Miller in late August 2006, expressing his readiness to resume work on the biography; Miller had signed for the letter but hadn’t otherwise acknowledged it. Then, about two weeks ago, in November, Roth had phoned Miller and mentioned in the course of “a friendly conversation” that he’d finished Exit Ghost; Miller “showed no interest in reading the novel” and said nothing about needing Roth’s assistance on the biography. Meanwhile Roth’s old friends were dying off, and others were in “declining health”: Solotaroff, Dick Stern, Tom Rogers, Sandy, and the last surviving witnesses to his family’s pre-Sandy years, his eighty-five-year-old cousin Florence Cohen and his even older cousins Gladys Kaplan and Milton Roth. “Has Philip’s ‘behavior’ prevented you from interviewing any or all of these people?” Roth wrote in Wylie’s name.

  Harry Maurer—whom Roth and Betty Powell had babysat fifty-plus years ago for their Bucknell friends Bob and Charlotte—was the author of three books, including Sex: An Oral History, and Roth made a deal with him. For $250 a head, plus expenses, Maurer was to conduct extensive interviews with Roth’s old friends—indeed, the older the better. For each interviewee, Roth provided Maurer with a long list of personalized questions, and his cover letter explained to his friends that he was in the midst of compiling “an audio archive” for an “autobiographical project.” “Would you have expected him to achieve success on the scale he has?” Roth directed Maurer to ask Jack Wheatcroft, as well as various others in so many words (“just how surprised are you by the career he has made?”). Manea and Thurman were prompted to speculate on Roth’s seemingly boundless appetite for hard work, solitude, and other noble privations (“How did he do it?”), while Joanna Clark was urged to reflect on her friend’s productivity “at a time when most writers of his age begin to lose their writing energy.”

  Hermione Lee and Al Alvarez, in England, were interviewed by Lisa Halliday, who was now living part-time with her boyfriend, Theo, an employee in the London office of the Wylie Agency. She’d been back in New York on October 13, 2006, when she thought she spotted Roth—then at the nadir of his post-Brigit bereavement—sitting by the river, possibly near his lost love’s childhood playground in Riverside Park. Halliday put a bright yellow note in his mailbox (“like a singing canary,” said Roth): “I wonder how you are. (You—or your doppelganger—looked thoughtfully sad, staring at New Jersey.) I think of you often (obviously) and hope you’re well. / Love, Lisa.” Roth promptly got in touch and told her right off the bat (re the clandestine financial arrangement she’d refused several months earlier), “I’m sorry. You were right and I was wrong.” Whereupon the two resumed seeing each other, quite platonically, whenever Halliday was back at her old apartment on West Eightieth. And the following summer, 2007, she rented an apartment in Paris, so she was able to interview Alain Finkielkraut too.

  BACK IN JUNE 1998—the day after he’d visited his new friend and incipient Faunia model, Sylvia, at the dairy farm—Roth was casting about for some way to use the interesting scene he’d just witnessed: “Lonoff gets dropped from the syllabi,” he wrote in a notebook: “AB [Amy Bellette] living on the dairy farm.” Eight years later he was ready to incorporate the first part of this idea into his final novel featuring Nathan Zuckerman as hero (versus peripheral narrator, as in the American Trilogy), coming full circle from his earlier appearance in The Ghost Writer. “This is how I will live,” the young Nathan vows in the latter, admiring the snowy purity of Lonoff’s isolated farmhouse in the Berk-shires. Exit Ghost opens almost fifty years later: the reclusive Zuckerman has not set foot in New York in eleven years, and Lonoff has been dead since 1961, all but forgotten despite his terrible lifelong pains to perfect his art.

  “From these bare bones of a plot,” Michiko Kakutani wrote, “Mr. Roth has created a melancholy, if occasionally funny, meditation on aging, mortality, loneliness and the losses that come with the passage of time—very much the same themes he examined in his sketchy 2006 novel, Everyman, and his equally slight 2001 novel, The Dying Animal.” Words like “sketchy” and “slight” were part of the Kakutani boilerplate for Roth’s later novels, but this time the same words occurred to other critics, too. Christopher Hitchens called Exit Ghost “very slight,” and, after venturing to describe the plot, wrote, “Am I by any chance boring you? I promise that I have done my best to put a light skip into this summary of a weary trudge. Roth’s own method of alleviation we can see coming a mile off: The female half of the want-ad couple”—that is, Jamie Logan and her husband, who place an ad in the New York Review offering a one-year swap of their Upper West Side apartment for a place in the country—“will turn out to be a fox, offering the ghost of a chance that Zuckerman’s flaccid and piss-soaked member can be revived.”

  This, alas, proves not to be in the cards for the cancer-stricken Zuckerman, though the “beautiful, privileged, intelligent, self-possessed, languid-looking” Jamie is a stirring reminder of what he’s lost in his later life as a backwoods celibate, and he can’t resist teasing out the abstract possibilities in his intermittent playlet, He and She. James Wood pointed to a parallel scene in The Ghost Writer where Zuckerman overhears his revered mentor, Lonoff, singing like “the great Durante” for his young mistress: “If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life!” he reflects, then proceeds to transform Amy Bellette into Anne Frank, whom Nathan imagines himself marrying and thereby silencing his critics for good. “In the earlier novel,” Wood observed, “fiction yearns to keep pace with the scandal and presumptuousness and fictionality of life; in the later novel, life yearns for the scandalous freedom and fantasy of fiction.” In Exit Ghost, Zuckerman is unable to transcend the “bitter helplessness” of his impotence in life or in art (though Roth liked to point out that, when he began the novel, he himself could hardly have been fitter: “While Zuckerman was sinking I was exuberantly bouncing about, on the streets and in bed, with a most sublime creature”).

  Zuckerman returns to the world too late, and comes to rue his retreat even more when his old friend, the consummate worldling, dies: “Suddenly George Plimpton stood for all that I had squandered by removing myself as forcefully as I had and retreating onto Lonoff’s mountain, to seek asylum there from the great variety of life.” Thus Zuckerman spells out his point, at last, after a rhapsodic, almost six-page eulogy in which the dialectic between him and Plimpton is explored in its every nook and cranny. Whereas Plimpton came from a background of almost pristine privilege, and was all the more blithe for that—“the urbane, witty gentleman of easy intelligence and aristocratic bearing”—Zuckerman himself had “never imagined getting anywhere without the unstinting persistence in which my hardworking family had diligently schooled me.” On and on it goes, the eulogy, devolving more and more into mawkishness: “George threw spirals as accurate as any a pass receiver could hope for in any league. . . .”

  “Well, he knows he’s writing shit now,” Ross Miller chuckled during his interview with Brustein in 2008, particularly referring to the Plimpton screed: “It just lies there like a lox. This sort of a thing he never would have done before” (that is, when he still had the benefit of a proper “trainer” or “coach”). Listening to his old friend level him in these interviews, Roth decided he’d gotten at least one thing right in Exit Ghost—the ambitious literary biographer, Richard Kliman (pronounced “climbin’ ”), who has a salacious theory about his subject, Lonoff, to which he means to attach any number of other misdeeds: namely that Lonoff had an incestuous affair with his half sister, a scandal somewhat inspired by the alleged incest of Hawthorne and Henry Roth, the author of Call It Sleep. “Lonoff was in hiding, not just as a man but as a writer,” Kliman glibly explains to an appalled Zuckerman. “The hiding was the catalyst for his genius. The wound and the bow.” “Somebody has to protect Manny from this man,” says Amy Bellette. “Any biography he writes will be the resentment of an inferior person writ large.”

  But who will protect Zuckerman? Or Philip Roth, for that matter? In interviews for Exit Ghost, Roth gave mixed signals as to how much the reader should infer about his own feelings toward the genre to which Kliman and Ross Miller aspire. He quipped in The Observer that, Exit Ghost and Portnoy notwithstanding, he counted himself “a friend of both” biography and masturbation; six weeks later, though, he remarked in a radio interview, “Biography gives a new dimension of terror to dying.” Meanwhile the editors of The New York Times Book Review, already piqued by his invidious Kliman portrait, learned that Roth had hired Harry Maurer, an oral historian, to conduct interviews for a “personal project.” In a piece that ran a month after publication of Exit Ghost, Ross Miller denied any kinship with Kliman and characterized his rapport with Roth as “the ‘candor’ of intellectual ‘equals.’ ” Be that as it may—the Times pressed—was it possible Roth would stop cooperating with him? “The doomsday scenario, you mean?” said Miller. “I don’t really know. I just think that we’re pretty far along for that to happen.”

  * A pseudonym.

  † An eight-inch scar from his clavicle to the base of his ribs from the quintuple bypass, a scar along the interior of his right leg from same, three scars all the way up his back, a scar on his side where doctors removed a bone to replace disc material in his spine, a scar where they entered to ream out his carotid artery, his old appendectomy scar, hernia scar, etc.

  CHAPTER

  Forty-Seven

  WHEN DICK STERN WAS ASKED BY THE NOBEL PRIZE Committee, in 1983, to suggest candidates for its literature prize, he pointed out that the two he’d suggested when previously asked, almost twenty years before, had both gone on to win: Saul Bellow and Samuel Beckett. Now he urged the committee to consider four Englishlanguage writers “who may have been disregarded because of certain sorts of popularity”: Philip Larkin, Harold Pinter, J. F. Powers, and Philip Roth—the last “a true craftsman with a streak of authentic comic genius.” Given the Swedish Academy’s aversion to comic genius, not to say “certain sorts of popularity,” only one of Stern’s candidates would ultimately be honored this time. Ten years later, in 1993, Harold Bloom named Roth in The Washington Post as the most deserving living candidate for the Nobel, and in the book Bloom published the following year, The Western Canon, he listed six Roth novels (the most of any living writer) as worthy of permanent interest—this, mind, before the publication of Sabbath’s Theater and American Pastoral, which became Bloom’s preeminent Roth novels thereafter.

  Roth was the perennial American favorite for the prize during the twenty-three-year dry spell that followed the 1993 selection of Toni Morrison, and his chances seemed vastly improved after the magisterial, high-minded American Trilogy. Certainly his friends rallied to the cause. In 2003, Joel Conarroe, the president of PEN America, enumerated the major prizes Roth had won for just the five novels he’d written since the age of sixty; quite aware that Roth was mostly known in Sweden as the author of Portnoy, and never mind the even more lurid Sabbath, Conarroe also reminded the academy that Roth was altruistic, what with his editorship of the Writers from the Other Europe series—“but it is clearly for his own extraordinary fiction,” he concluded, “and not for good international citizenship, as it were, that he is worthy of the one major award he has not yet been given. There is no living writer more deserving of a Nobel Prize for Literature.” Five years later, writing on behalf of the British Academy, Hermione Lee tried a kind of decorous shaming: “It is a matter of amazement to many cultural commentators, readers, scholars and critics, not only within the United States but worldwide, that he has not yet been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.” Naturally she also mentioned Writers from the Other Europe, to no avail.

  That was the year (2008) the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Horace Engdahl, let it be known the fix was in for European, or anyway non-American, writers. The United States is “too isolated, too insular,” he said, noting that only 3 percent of books published in the States each year were works in translation, versus 27 percent in France and 28 percent in Spain. “Europe,” he said, “still is the center of the literary world.” Roth was reminded of Engdahl’s remarks the following year, when, as the first-ever recipient of the PEN/Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, he sat on the 2009 jury considering “a superabundant pool of superior American talent” before deciding to give the award to Cormac McCarthy. “[W]e would contend,” Roth said at the time, “that American novelists must surely be among the best in the world.” Privately Roth was always dismissive on the subject of the Nobel, which he liked to call a “narcissistic extravaganza.” So would he pull a Sartre and turn it down? “No, I wouldn’t do anything out of the ordinary,” he said on October 13, 2012, two days after the prize had gone to Mo Yan of China. “I would accept it. But it’s not gonna happen.”

  ON APRIL 11, 2008, in honor of Roth’s seventy-fifth birthday, a tribute was held at Columbia’s inauspiciously named Miller Theatre. While Roth sat in the front row, six feet away, two panels of writers and critics discussed his work. The first, moderated by Judith Thurman, was a relatively young group of writers including Charles D’Ambrosio, Nathan Englander, and Jonathan Lethem, who all mentioned their formative discovery of Roth’s work on their parents’ bookshelves. As a boy, Englander’s identification with Roth was reinforced by the way his mother used to call him to table: “Dinner’s ready, Portnoy!”

  The second panel, moderated by Conarroe, comprised an older generation, each of whom was asked to discuss a favorite Roth novel for about five minutes. After Claudia Roth Pierpont and Ben Taylor gave loving appreciations of Sabbath and Shylock, respectively, Hermione Lee spoke with daunting poise about The Ghost Writer; meanwhile Ross Miller either peered at his notes or gazed wanly into the darkness. He was next.

  “It seems like we planned this, Hermione,” he began, noting that he intended to discuss The Counterlife, which, after all, “completes this first five-book exploration of the life of Nathan Zuckerman, the subject which is the, probably, an unprecedented series of books on the vocation of a writer. . . .

  So The Counterlife plays with, engages certain conceits or ideas that this career as a writer has generated in Zuckerman, that is, not only do writers, novelists, impersonate other people . . . but we’re impersonating other people, that is, civilians, everyone here. We do various impersonations, and the exploration of this is titanically treated in The Counterlife with a series of, of, of episodes that have a certain logical connection but there’s really no necessity for it.

  On it went. “I was shocked by his performance,” Roth said of Miller, who sidled up to him afterward and murmured, “I wasn’t much impressed by the other three.”

  “Well, now he’s surrounded with sycophants,” said Miller, three months later, during what would prove his final interview (with Brustein) as a biographer. “The irony is that they’re either homosexual men—of course he’s homophobic—or these silly women. They’re serious women, but they’re silly in their presentation of self. They’re low impact: he likes that.” Two years later, Roth himself would listen to these interviews, one after another, all nine of them,* pausing to make notes along the way. “I don’t even think Gitta Sereny’s moral assessment of Albert Speer is as bleak as Ross’s of me,” he observed at one point.

  Roth especially regretted exposing his only surviving family members to Miller’s “mean, insatiably vilifying spirit”—his cousin Florence, for instance, who would die of cancer soon after Miller finally interviewed her on March 4, 2007. At one point she regaled him with a memory of how she used to phone Philip from Sandy’s New York apartment, alerting him that his parents had just left and would soon be home, where Philip was entertaining Maxine or some other young woman. “This is really a trip down mammary lane,” Miller quipped for the eighty-five-year-old woman, followed by an outburst that must have startled her: “There is a predatory side to both Sandy and Philip. They look at women—I’m not gonna write about this—but they are misogynist. They talk about women in that way.”

  Miller also tried to entice Roth’s sickly, adoring brother into confirming certain grim assumptions. “I always refer to it as the broken wing syndrome,” Sandy mildly replied, after Miller noted how a number of Philip’s girlfriends had had fathers who killed themselves. “I have a broken wing and I go for broken wings.” “But you don’t break wings,” said Miller, and Sandy, after a shocked pause, replied, “Doesn’t even enter my thinking.” Miller riffed on the theme more explicitly with Stern, citing Roth’s scheme to get Brigit pregnant so he could “capture her,” the better to have a young woman taking care of him in his dotage—a young woman, moreover, who’d previously cared for a dying mother and therefore had the “Janis [Bellow] credential.”

  Stern mulled this disturbing conversation for more than two weeks before phoning Roth on December 31, 2006: Ross, he said, had interrupted him repeatedly, ranting away for some “85 percent” of the interview; ominous, too, Stern thought, was Ross’s remark that he wouldn’t publish his book until Roth was dead. “I conclude from this that Ross is in a hostilely rivalrous relationship with me,” Roth noted after hanging up, “because of his work for Volume Three of the LOA series being criticized and rejected by me.” In the months ahead, Roth continued to get reports that his biographer had gone rogue—“This man is not your friend,” his cousin Florence informed him—until, after the Columbia tribute, Thurman got an earful from Miller. According to an alarmed memo Roth prepared on May 29, 2008, for his executors, Golier and Wylie, Miller had boasted to Thurman that he’d actually “coauthored” Roth’s novels, beginning with The Counterlife, as opposed to reading them in rough draft and helpfully discussing them afterward. Also he’d confidently diagnosed Roth as manic-depressive; Thurman had argued with Miller that she’d certainly seen Roth depressed, but hardly manic—if the happy relief that follows recovery from a major depression is mania, well, then most of her friends were manic-depressive. Hearing of this, Roth was reminded of the Little, Brown lawyer’s mention of a “reliable source” for the reference to his alleged “bipolar disorder” in galleys for Leaving a Doll’s House.†