And that wasn’t all. Awaiting Roth in the museum’s indoor courtyard were three members of the Weequahic marching band, their blasting fanfare followed by the three hundred or so guests singing “Happy Birthday.” Roth cut into a book-shaped cake while Louise Erdrich gave an Ojibwe blessing, aptly dubbing him the Everlasting Man of Opposites.

  ROTH WAS RICHLY HONORED during his final years. In 2012, he won Spain’s Prince of Asturias Award (50,000 euros) for a writer “whose literary work represents a significant contribution to universal literature.” At the October ceremony in Oviedo, the University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum agreed to read Roth’s rather cranky acceptance speech, in which he affected a pleasant surprise that his work could “compete with the clichéd, super-simplified representation of America that befogs the perception of my country nearly everywhere.”

  The following spring he received the Literary Service Award from PEN America, appearing to fulfill Olga’s bitter prediction in Roth’s screenplay version of The Prague Orgy: “On top of all your millions of dollars and millions of girls, you will win the American Prize for Idealism about Literature”—this, in Zuckerman’s case, for smuggling “from behind the Iron Curtain two hundred unpublished Yiddish stories written by the victim of a Nazi bullet,” an endeavor that ultimately fails. Roth, however, had been quite successful in carrying out his clandestine Ad Hoc Fund subsidizing Czech dissidents in the seventies, not to say his editorship of Writers from the Other Europe.

  As for his reputation in France, the cover of the September 21, 2011, issue of Le Nouvel Observateur said it all: “Philippe Roth: Le roi.” Two years later he was named a Commandeur de la Légion d’honneur at the French consulate on Fifth Avenue, where they also laid a ceremonial brick for the first bookshop in Manhattan devoted entirely to French literature and translations. “He had a reputation as a literary troublemaker,” Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius remarked of Roth to the chicly attired crowd of a hundred or so, “and at the time, nobody imagined such an award.” “So quickly!” Roth sighed, when the medal clattered to the floor before Fabius could place it around his neck. Following brief remarks, France’s most beloved American writer managed a phrase of the language he never came close to mastering: “Je suis absolutement ravi.” Afterward, he and his entourage—Julia Golier and her husband, Bill Bornmann, Amelia and William, Ben Taylor and Claudia Roth Pierpont—grabbed dinner at the Shake Shack on Columbus Avenue and returned to Roth’s apartment. “The entertainment for the evening,” said Roth, “requested by me, was Amelia singing, in her high, sweet, pure voice, the song she was to use for her audition the next day for a big school musical: ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly,’ from My Fair Lady. Wonderful evening.”

  Perhaps the most momentous recognition was the honorary degree Roth received from the Jewish Theological Seminary on May 22, 2014—a kind of détente, at last, between Philip Roth and the Jewish cultural establishment. “Can you think of an American writer who took such a moral assault in the early years of his career?” Roth wondered aloud in 2004; even Mailer, he said, hadn’t been so roundly denounced. Isaac Singer had wisely decided (so Roth thought) to publish an English translation of his novel Shadows on the Hudson posthumously, lest he be likewise reviled for suggesting American Jews are capable of gross vulgarity and sexual transgression. As for Roth: his Weequahic buddies Bob Heyman and Howie Silver had attended a lecture only a few years before at their temple in West Palm Beach, “Is Philip Roth an Anti-Semite?”—so the signboard blared in big letters, for weeks, on the temple lawn facing a major thoroughfare.

  Over the years Roth had received no fewer than four National Jewish Book Awards, and in 1998 the Jewish Book Council had given him its Lifetime Literary Achievement Award (Roth donated the honorarium to the Anti-Defamation League). “Roth has won,” the Forward announced in 2012; “American Jews today are more the heirs of Portnoy than of his uptight community. . . . We can laugh today because we are no longer compelled to cry.” Roth, more than anyone, was aware of his victory: “Now that writing’s been over for close to four years,” he wrote Conarroe in 2013, “virtually every night I go to sleep with a goofy smile on my face and in the dark am made positively gleeful by softly uttering aloud, ‘I have recovered my life before I was embattled. The battles are over. I’ve come home. And I won.’ ”

  But what the obsessive man still wanted, when he wasn’t blissfully muttering in bed, was an apology: “This guy was brutally and unfairly attacked by people who have no right,” he wanted some Jewish personage to say, publicly, and that’s pretty much what his latest honorary degree amounted to. Thus the headline (again in the Forward) the day after: PHILIP ROTH, ONCE OUTCAST, JOINS JEWISH FOLD WITH JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY HONOR. Roth had recognized the proffered degree as a “peace pipe” and promptly accepted; he’d also liked the cut of Chancellor Arnold Eisen’s jib, and vice versa: Roth was “the greatest sociologist on American Jewish life, without doubt,” said Eisen, himself an eminent sociologist. As Roth quipped to a friend, “All that’s missing now is the Gloria Steinem Award from the National Organization for Women and the cherished Kakutani Prize.”

  The commencement took place on the seminary’s tented quadrangle at Broadway and 122nd; a klezmer band played the processional march, and two young cantors, a man and a woman, sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Hatikvah,” the Israeli anthem. Roth was especially moved when all the parents were asked to stand: “I have about twelve honorary degrees,” he said, “and I have never been at a commencement where parents were applauded for the success of their children. That had a special Jewish flavor.” More than ever, in fact, what Roth missed amid an otherwise rapturously happy day was his mother and father (“what a present to have been able to deliver to them”). He would have dearly loved for them to witness the long standing ovation when he received his hood, the dozens of people lining up afterward to get their books signed (including a first edition of Portnoy brought by Ruth Calderon, a liberal member of the Knesset and fellow honoree). Roth had planned to skip the postceremonial luncheon, because his back was killing him, but he was having too good a time: “I just dosed myself,” he said. “Nobody has ever been higher on opioids at the Jewish Seminary than me. It was really wonderful.”

  That left only one major award unwon; indeed, a large part of the fun by then—at least in Stockholm—seemed to be snubbing Roth. A gleeful rumor was spread that the poor fellow continued to make the two-hour trek from Connecticut to New York, every October, and sit in his agent’s office forlornly awaiting the Call, whereupon the freshly printed publicity schedule would be activated at last: “There he would sit,” Emma Brockes of The Guardian conjectured, “in a meeting room presumably prepared with refreshments, and at the end of the day, make the long, sad trip back to Connecticut.”¶ Actually, on the appointed day, Roth was usually awoken by a morning phone call from his friend Bernie Avishai: “Mr. Rot,” he’d say, in what he fancied was a Swedish accent, “ve are sorry to haf to inform you that, yet again, you did not vin the price.”

  “Can we please stop the nonsense and give Philip Roth a Nobel Prize for Literature before he dies?” Michael Bourne wrote in a 2011 “Open Letter to the Swedish Academy” that appeared in The Millions. The following year, The Telegraph urged the Swedes to give Roth the prize as a “retirement present,” whereas Bloomberg News warned that they were in danger of rendering the whole thing “meaningless” if they continued to shaft Roth. In 2013, the day after Alice Munro was named the winner, Tablet magazine ran a series of pieces (“The Counter Prize”) pretending that Roth’s turn had come round at last. “How the King of Shmutz Won the World” was the title of one item by Josh Lambert, who commended the academy for finally proving they weren’t, after all, “full of out-oftouch Swedish prigs.” And speaking of shmutz: Alana Newhouse, the editor of Tablet (who occasionally met Roth for coffee), was on the phone with a plumber, trying to fix her parents’ toilet, when she turned the wrong knob and “was covered essentially in shit water”; at that moment her cell phone indicated another call (“BLOCKED”) that proved to be Roth. “This is hilarious,” he said of her “Counter Prize” feature, and she sat there listening, befouled, while he went on about things.

  In 2014, Roth guaranteed another snub when he made a brief remark (“I can’t wait to be thrown the slow curve about the Nobel Prize,” he said beforehand) in a long, eloquent interview for the Stockholm newspaper Svenska Dagbladet: “I wonder if I had called Portnoy’s Complaint ‘The Orgasm under Rapacious Capitalism,’ if I would thereby have earned the favor of the Swedish Academy.” Mischievously The Guardian began to wonder who would take Roth’s place, ten years hence, as the “white, male literary novelist” whose “excessive self-absorption, general snobbishness and high self-regard” would make him the perfect foil for the Swedes: “Step forward Jonathan Franzen! Your new role awaits!”

  REACTIONS TO BOB DYLAN’S NOBEL PRIZE: Shock, Elation and Concern for Philip Roth, read a headline in The Washington Post on October 13, 2016. Giving it to Dylan—as The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz tweeted—was “maybe the most effective trolling of Philip Roth the Swedes could ever have come up with” and effectively ended whatever fugitive hope remained for him: After all, twenty-three years had passed since the prize had gone to another American, Toni Morrison, who called Dylan “an impressive choice.” Asked for his own thoughts, Roth said “It’s okay, but next year I hope Peter, Paul and Mary get it.”

  * In 1949, a first baseman for the Chicago Cubs, Eddie Waitkus, was shot by a deranged fan, like Hobbs in the novel; he survived and continued his career.

  † See page 49.

  ‡ Alan Lelchuk was invited to appear on a biography panel for the “Roth@80” conference; a fee of $135 was mentioned, and Lelchuk assumed this to be his meager honorarium. But no: as an earnest member of the Philip Roth Society regretfully informed him, Lelchuk himself was expected to pony up that amount. Lelchuk stayed home.

  § “So he knew how to do even that, the hardest thing,” Updike famously wrote of Ted Williams. “Quit.” Williams’s triumphant exit was an irresistible touchstone for Roth’s, and the baseball/Williams motif was pervasive vis-à-vis Roth’s 80th: “The evening felt almost as if Hank Aaron, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Duke Snider all showed up to toast Ted Williams,” Kellman wrote.

  ¶ “You should know that not once in my life have I sat in the Wylie office or anywhere else waiting for the Nobel Prize committee to call,” Roth indignantly disabused me. For one thing (he pointed out), the announcement is made at 6:00 a.m. EDT, so there’s no question of waiting all day for the call. Back in the early 2000s, he admitted, when he was a more serious contender, Wylie had told him that, if he got the nod, he should report either to the agency or the Houghton office for a morning press conference; on the off chance he was still in Connecticut as late as October, one or two Wylie people would drive up early in the morning to coordinate a press response there.

  CHAPTER

  Fifty

  ROTH’S FAVORITE BOOKSELLER WAS ENRICO ADELMAN, a voluble Italian Jew who cherished a precise recollection of his first meeting with Roth—Mother’s Day, 1989—when the great writer and his companion (Claire Bloom) paused at Adelman’s book stand outside Zabar’s. “Do you want it?” Roth asked Bloom, when she picked up a book by Simon Schama. “I’ll buy it for you, mother.” “You know,” said Adelman, “you look a lot like Philip Roth.” Roth extended his hand: “I am.” After that, the bookman spotted his idol on Broadway from time to time, and would ask him to stop and sign a few copies of his work. Then Adelman “had a premonition” when The Plot Against America was about to be published, and ordered a thousand copies. “Didn’t faze him in the least,” he said of Roth, who gave him careful directions to his place in Connecticut, where they set up a signing table in the kitchen and got to work, breaking now and then to walk around the property. So it went with every book thereafter. “Because I like him,” Roth explained of his kindness toward Adelman, who called Roth his “401K.”

  “Going out with Philip Roth in Manhattan is like going out with Louis XIV in Versailles,” said Hermione Lee, an observation Roth amended: “Only as far down as West Sixty-ninth Street.” “I know you!” a lively old man accosted Roth, who was walking along Upper Broadway with Claudia Roth Pierpont. In the midst of a nonstop ten-minute spiel, the old man volunteered that he was (1) a Korean War veteran and (2) Jewish. “Really?” Roth said of (2). “You coulda fooled me.” They were suddenly interrupted by another passerby: “You’re my husband’s favorite novelist!” a woman said, then returned brandishing her cell phone: “My husband’s on the phone!” Roth listened, smiling, while the husband explained he’d love to come to the corner but he was all tied up at work, etc. Meanwhile the Korean War veteran hung fire, eager to resume his monologue.

  After his retirement, Roth claimed he wanted nothing better than “to fade forever from the public scene,” but when it came to a point he found it rather hard to relinquish the spotlight. His front-page interview with the Times, published November 17, 2012, was supposed to be his “last,” but within a few months he was chatting with NPR and the Television Critics Association, and a year later he couldn’t resist “address[ing] those Nobel Prize idiots who said that American literature was ‘provincial’ ” via his interview with Svenska Dagbladet, which the Times reprinted in full. Along with that bon mot about “The Orgasm under Rapacious Capitalism,” Roth held forth about what had made his generation of American writers so exceptional, listing qualities the Swedish Academy (as Roth saw it) was likely to disdain:

  The American novelist’s indifference to, if not contempt for, “critical” theory. Aesthetic freedom unhampered by all the high-and-mighty isms and their humorlessness. . . . Writing that is uncontaminated by political propaganda—or even political responsibility. . . . And surely the fact that writers don’t mean a goddamn thing to nine-tenths of the population doesn’t hurt. It’s inebriating.

  Roth then ticked off no fewer than seventy outstanding postwar American writers, in no particular order, except that Bellow came first. The list was nothing if not eclectic, including most of the obvious greats, several old and new friends, the odd curveball (Louis Auchincloss?), every type of stylist (Ann Beattie, John Barth, William Vollmann), and even a few bêtes noires like Gass (but not Baraka or du Plessix Gray).

  For his reading at the 92nd Street Y on May 8, 2014, Roth said he’d wear a sign around his neck that said “Positively Last Appearance on Any Stage.” It would have been a stellar exit. According to the Huffington Post, the excitement among the capacity crowd “felt more like a rock concert than a literary reading.” Pierpont opened with a talk about the eminently round female characters in Roth’s fiction, then Nicole Krauss introduced the main act, who seated himself at a table dramatically lit à la Krapp’s Last Tape. Roth read a somber passage from Sabbath where the family learns of Morty’s death, followed by the graveyard scene he’d read in Newark, and was furious when “all” the Times had to say about his valedictory performance was that he’d “kept things clean.” “Content is meaningless to these culture journalists,” he remarked, hardly for the first time. “Thirty-one books of a writing career and the truly indelible mark that I made is as a dirty writer.”* “You can write this down,” Roth said to a reporter before turning to greet fans at the 92Y. “This was absolutely the last appearance I will make on any public stage, anywhere.”

  A week later he appeared at the Edison Hotel in Manhattan to accept the inaugural Yaddo Artist Medal, and gave the usual witty, highly polished speech. Since he’d lately promised never to appear on a public stage again, his old friend Alison Lurie, who introduced him, wondered whether he’d show up—and naturally the Times made light of his short-lived retirement from the public eye, duly noting Lurie’s quip about a possible no-show. “In over fifty years of making public appearances I have missed attending three public events,” Roth bitterly responded to this latest snipe; as for the Times’s risibility over yet another “reading” (though in fact he’d promised never again to appear), “where is the contradiction or even the inconsistency? I was not giving a public reading, I was getting an award”—during which he’d delivered a speech about the opportunity Yaddo afforded artists who wished to retreat “from zany lovers, serpent-toothed children, dim-witted colleagues, unscrupulous rivals, illiterate students, dunning creditors, unmet deadlines, noisy upstairs neighbors, and cramped living quarters, in flight from a superabundance of trivialities, distractions, futilities, treacheries, and, not least, from the spreading miasma of everyday malice. . . .”