Taylor was, indeed, like nothing so much as an unusually devoted son—forever at Roth’s disposal, unlike his straight friends, who were often distracted by children and the like. “He did say ‘I love you’ to me once,” Taylor said in 2014. “There’s been other times when I thought he was going to say it, but he hung up on me.”

  A LESS CLASSIFIABLE but no less steady companion, for a time, was Roth’s cook, Catherine. “You’re the best thing that’s happened to me in years,” he murmured into her ear at his eightieth birthday in Newark. Except for his slow daily walks and aqua-jogging at St. Bart’s, Roth had become increasingly housebound, and New York would have been intolerably lonely without his cook’s “lovely face” to look forward to in the late afternoon, when she arrived to make dinner and the next day’s lunch. Also Roth was too infirm to spend summers alone in Connecticut, “And to have beautiful, sweet-tempered, ultracompetent” Catherine with him, he said, “sharing the plantation, is an unceasing source of joy.”

  Roth insisted on subsidizing her education, and arranged for her to take Barbara Sproul’s Faith and Disbelief course at Hunter; he even read the assigned books with her—a daunting list including the likes of Kierkegaard, Buber, Teilhard de Chardin, Sartre, and Nietzsche. When she managed a B+ in the course, Roth exulted as though he (or she) had finally won the Nobel: “I don’t know what life would have been like for her had she not been working for me now for three years. The bond of friendship between us is not improperly called love. She just makes me so damn happy!” Far from resting on this laurel, he promptly pushed her to enroll in German History 1848–1945 for the Fall 2014 semester, and packed two copies of the textbook so they could read it in tandem that summer in Connecticut. “I remember just panicking,” said von Klitzing, whose interest in German history was, in fact, minimal, and who wanted more time to herself than Roth’s reading program would likely allow. He was visibly downcast when she asked him to wait until fall.

  German history wasn’t the only thing Roth had gotten wrong about the young woman. Though he boasted to others about her atheism—he fancied her a proper Rothian skeptic—she had “a really big faith” that she kept to herself, lest he try talking her out of it, the way he tried talking her out of marriage and children. Whenever she arrived for work, he’d ask her to sit down and talk to him for half an hour or so, and once, while discussing Buber, he referred to theirs as the higher kind of “I and Thou” relationship. That would have been fine, if not for his occasionally calling her baby (“Look, I shaved for you, baby!”), or, while watching TV together in Connecticut, suddenly taking her hand and gazing at her searchingly. “What are you doing?” she asked. “I thought you wanted us to hold hands,” he said vaguely, and she replied “No.” Alarmed, she discussed such episodes with her AA sponsor, who reminded her that Roth was an octogenarian with a fentanyl patch, apt to have moments of confusion.

  When Bernie Avishai visited Roth in the fall, he found him “deeply demoralized.” Lame and weary, he had to cut their walk short, and while resting on a bench he confessed his loneliness and terror that he’d end up a total invalid like his brother. Catherine, meanwhile, was evasive whenever he tried to discuss German history, and finally admitted she’d dropped her courses that semester. Moreover she didn’t want to return to Connecticut with him next summer. “So essentially you’re quitting,” said Roth. “I’m not firing you. You can’t do the job.” She stood up and began making dinner, while Roth turned around in his Eames chair and either stared out the darkened window or at the reflection of her in the kitchen behind him—she wasn’t sure which. He was totally silent. At last she went to check on him, and his face was covered with tears.

  WHILE ROTH STRUGGLED against the steady encroachments of old age, his generation of friends went on sliding, he said, “like the warming glaciers into the oblivious sea.” He’d been moved to mend relations with Dick Stern on February 1, 2004—his mother’s 100th birthday: “This has to stop,” he wrote, reminding Stern that he’d been a particular favorite of Bess. Afterward Roth went to Chicago to cement their reconciliation; Stern’s wife, Alane, stayed upstairs while the two broke the ice, and when she came down they were laughing “as if no time had passed,” and Roth bolted up to give her a big hug and kiss. On January 22, 2013, Roth phoned to chat about Obama’s second inauguration, and Alane told him the doctors had diagnosed Stern with inoperable cancer. Two days later he died.

  “He was an inspiring figure as a literature professor and an ace of great virtuosity as a novelist, short story writer, essayist and raconteur,” Roth told The New York Times the day of Stern’s death, resolved as ever to salvage the man’s long-neglected literary reputation. He wrote an eloquent eulogy for Stern’s memorial in Chicago, and later got in touch with Edwin Frank of New York Review Books, urging him (successfully) to publish a new edition of what Roth had always considered his friend’s masterpiece, for which a modified version of Roth’s eulogy served as the introduction: “Other Men’s Daughters is to the sixties what The Great Gatsby was to the twenties, The Grapes of Wrath to the thirties, and Rabbit Is Rich to the seventies: a microscope exactly focused upon a thinly sliced specimen of what was once the present moment.”

  “I was thrilled that you were there,” Roth wrote Stu and Bette Lehman after his eightieth birthday in Newark, “all of us back on native ground together, and still breathing.” Naturally it pleased Roth that his Weequahic pals got to see what a fuss the world made over him, though his oldest friend, Marty Weich, had been too frail to attend. Having almost died from septicemia two years before, Weich was now a wizened, bewildered figure in a wheelchair—the embodiment of Roth’s dictum “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.” Propelled by a burly male nurse, Weich had managed a visit to Roth’s apartment in October 2012; Roth brought out their high school yearbook, and the two men sat holding hands while Weich lowered his face within inches of each page muttering “Jesus Christ . . . Jesus Christ. . . .” Because of medical bills and other terrible setbacks, the Weichs were all but destitute; Roth wrote them a check for $25,000 and phoned Stu Lehman and Bob Heyman, who also agreed to help.

  Lehman died of cancer in April 2014, having achieved a success in life very different from that of his world-famous friend. Happily married to his college sweetheart, with whom he had three children and many grandchildren, Lehman had divided his life among family, a successful oral surgery practice, and his boat—nice rewards after a childhood blighted by his mother’s early death and his father’s desertion. As for Weich—tall, handsome, smart, talented, athletic, polite, “every mother’s dream of the Jewish prince”—he was kept afloat by Roth and others until he choked to death in 2016.

  On December 5, 2015, Nela Wagman emailed Roth that her mother, Riki, was dying of pancreatic cancer. Roth had long ago lost interest in his friend’s fiction. Her crazily transgressive early work, like Lelchuk’s, had made Roth feel less alone as the author of Portnoy, but her stock had plummeted over the years, both in his eyes and the world’s. “She writes the same book again and again,” he said, “and always in screaming caps and italics . . . and everything exaggerated in the lamest way.” He’d been all but entirely out of touch when her lovable, bearish husband, Howard, died in 2011, whereupon Roth showed up for the shiva; five years later, too, he visited Riki’s deathbed and made one-sided conversation. “Riki, do you know who I am?” he asked her at last. She narrowed her eyes: “I know perfectly well who you are.”

  “It’s the damn poignancy of everything that rocks me a little,” Roth wrote Conarroe during this twilight era.

  I see something beautiful or just altogether ordinary and I say to myself, “Take a good, long look. Look at it as if you’re never going to see it again. Because maybe you won’t.” Makes even one’s familiar surroundings breathtaking, doesn’t it? “Here I am,” think I, “ambling happily into oblivion.” The strategy I’ve been using on myself for decades now is that whenever death comes to mind in its most distressing form, I tell myself, quite simply, “I’m here and it’s now.” And those five little words do the trick. I’m here and it’s now. So long as I am alive I’m immortal, am I not?

  Sometimes those five little words did the trick, but often enough Roth was seized with angst—as when he realized that he was now older than Sandy ever got to be. “A great dynamism has gone out of my life,” he said, his laughter subsiding after Ben Taylor had read aloud Sabbath’s uproarious self-written obituary (“Did Nothing for Israel”). “And I feel the lack of it.”

  ROTH WAS BUSILY putting his affairs in order. A spate of definitive editions were published in time for him to pore over proofs and translators’ notes: the tenth and final LOA volume (the only one not “edited” by Ross Miller), Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960–2013; the first of four Pléiade volumes, Romans et nouvelles 1959–1977; and the first of three Meridiani volumes, Romanzi 1959–1986. The Pléiade was the prototype for all such canonical libraries, and Roth joined a handful of Americans—William Faulkner, Henry James, Jack London—and, with Mario Vargas Llosa, one of only two living non-French authors to be so enshrined. The inclusion of his work among the gorgeous, gold-embossed leather volumes ensured “that generations of foreign readers will study him with the reverence reserved for the so-called ‘great books,’ ” said The Washington Post. “In a secular society that still tends to venerate literary achievement the way America worships athletics, the Pléiade is, in a sense, the Bible.”

  Roth’s penultimate birthday was celebrated a day early, chez Thurman, on March 18, 2017: Along with Halliday, Krauss, Conarroe, Pierpont, Taylor, and the hostess, Roth raised a glass to Updike, whose eighty-fifth birthday it was; then, too, everyone roasted the recently inaugurated president. The next day, in an email, Roth described the occasion as “joyous,” though two months later he candidly admitted he couldn’t remember a thing about it. His short-term memory was shot, but in the moment Roth was as lucid as ever, and therefore appalled by the “nightmare now in America”: “the man elected to be president of the United States is a malignant narcissist,” he wrote a French journalist, “a pathological liar, a blustering ignoramus, vile, vengeful, and probably a bit demented. And I am minimizing his shortcomings.” A few months later in the Times (“No Longer Writing, Philip Roth Still Has Plenty to Say”), he returned to the subject of this “massive fraud, the evil sum of his deficiencies, devoid of everything but the hollow ideology of a megalomaniac.”

  This was Roth’s final interview—again with McGrath—published on January 16, 2018, four months before his death. Given his lifelong preoccupation with male sexual desire, Roth was expected to comment on the burgeoning #MeToo movement, a prospect that rattled him—all the more because he worried that Anna Steiger’s friend Felicity would seize the moment to falsely accuse him of something more grievous than making a pass on the stairs (and whatever obnoxious ragging may have followed). “Help me with this,” he wrote Avishai.

  I heed the cry of the women insulted and injured. I have nothing but sympathy for their pain and their need for justice. But I am also made anxious by the nature of the tribunal that is adjudicating these charges. I am made anxious, as a civil libertarian, because there doesn’t seem to be a tribunal. What I see instead is publicized accusation instantly followed by peremptory punishment. I see the accused denied the right of habeas corpus, the right to face and examine his accuser, and the right to defend himself in anything resembling a genuine judicial setting, where careful distinctions might be able to be drawn as to the severity of the reported crime.

  In the end Roth responded in rather nervously ornate language (“I have imagined”—i.e., in his work—“a small coterie of unsettled men possessed by just such inflammatory forces they must negotiate and contend with”) to the effect that he was not “astonished” by the male misconduct that had recently come to light. Judging by the busy Comment section on the Times website, it was the least satisfactory answer in an otherwise well-received interview.

  THE BEST PART OF Roth’s eighty-fourth birthday was a long visit from Halliday, who was five months pregnant. On their last day together, they went to see a matinee of The Sense of an Ending, based on the Julian Barnes novel; at the climax, the hero’s daughter has just given birth but worries because the delivery room is silent (“Why isn’t my baby crying?”). It turns out the baby is fine, but amid the suspense Halliday became tearful—her previous pregnancy had ended in miscarriage—and Roth took her hand and held it for the rest of the movie. “You will go on to have a baby,” he’d told her after the miscarriage, “and you will love it. It’s something I missed out on, but you won’t.”

  Lisa’s daughter, Stella Rose, was born on July 23, 2017, and six months later she and Theo and the baby came to New York for the publication of her first novel, Asymmetry—featuring a character named Ezra Blazer who is, essentially, a portrait of Roth’s most benevolent self, which Halliday had a way of bringing out. The novel was a hit (it would appear on the Times’ Ten Best list for 2018) and Roth loved it too, but above all he was enchanted by Stella: “a beautiful, smiling creature who seems never to cry and is curious about everything.”§ Several friends came to Roth’s apartment to meet the baby, and on the last day Lucy Warner paid one of her periodic visits and stayed awhile: “So here we all were,” said Roth, “past, present, and future, everybody jolly, everybody kissing everybody else—it was like the ending of As You Like It.”

  The previous summer—Roth’s last—he’d spent half a day with his lawyer, revising his will and arranging other details relating to his funeral and estate: “and so,” he wrote Joanna Clark afterward, “it seems I have entered a posthumous existence with everything in place for my demise.” Too infirm to walk very far, he rode around his property in a golf cart, while at night he’d have “a deliberate memory session” in bed, trying to evoke as precisely as possible every person he’d ever known and every place he’d ever lived. Now and then it occurred to him that he’d never written about this or that person, place, or thing, and “out of ancient habit” he’d start to get up and write it down—then, with relief, he’d remember he wasn’t “slavishly hearkening, day or night, to the demands of [his] talent anymore.” “Getting into bed at night I smile and think, ‘I lived another day,’ ” he told the Times. “And then it’s astonishing again to awaken eight hours later and to see that it is morning of the next day and that I continue to be here. . . . I go to sleep smiling and I wake up smiling. I’m very pleased that I’m still alive.”

  IN AUGUST 2016, after a summer of fairly vigorous daily swimming, Roth had begun to feel breathless while climbing stairs, and thus learned he was due for a transcatheter aortic valve replacement, using (in Roth’s case) cow tissue. On September 10 he left the hospital “feeling quite bouncy,” but within nine days he was so exhausted he could hardly dress himself. For almost two months he was stranded in his apartment, tended by nurses, barely able to read: “I want to die I feel so rotten.” At last a doctor found that blood clots had formed on the leaflets of his new valve, preventing proper function, so he was given a powerful blood thinner, Coumadin. “Boy, am I getting tired of my resilience,” he said on February 3, 2017, finally able to return to the pool four times a week and force himself up and down the interior stairwell of his building.

  A little over a year later, on April 29, 2018, Roth’s pulse soared to 170. “I’m in the hospital of all places,” he emailed Halliday, who was en route from Massachusetts to visit him in New York. “Was admitted last night to emergency room with bad bout of arrhythmia. Under control now and I’m resting quietly in hospital bed. Call me.” Taylor had stayed with him at Lenox Hill Hospital overnight, and, when Halliday arrived, Roth told her he’d considered waiting until morning to go to the hospital but decided to call an ambulance right away because “You only have one life.” At the direction of his cardiologist, Stanley Schneller, he was transferred to the cardiac ICU at New York–Presbyterian. Thirty-six years after his diagnosis of “significant” coronary artery disease, it looked as though Roth would cheat death again: within a few days Jeffrey Moses operated, replacing two blocked stents, and Schneller reported “a dramatic and immediate improvement in hemodynamic.” Still, Roth was in ghastly pain. His anticoagulant had caused a spontaneous bleed in his pelvis, and any position in bed was torture. Finally, with the help of a physical therapist, he managed to stand and take a few steps on May 18, and again it looked as though he might go home.

  But it soon became clear he was in end-stage heart failure. The attacks of arrhythmia returned, and his abdomen bloated with backed-up fluid. Doctors explained he could live perhaps another three to six months with the help of powerful IV diuretics, but when Roth realized he wouldn’t be able to return to the country, swim, or even leave his bed, he decided to accept palliative care. He spoke briefly to his dearest friends. “I have been to see the great enemy,” he told Ben, “and walked around him, and talked to him, and he is not to be feared. I promise.” The day before his death, as he was drifting off, one of his Weequahic buddies, Howard Silver, called his cell phone. “Oh no!” said Silver, when Julia answered and explained the situation. “Tell him it’s Howie! Shout it, so he can hear it!” She obliged, then told Silver that Philip had understood and smiled. Perhaps Roth was thinking along the lines of what another old classmate, Dorothy Brand, had written him not long before: “You’ve had a great family, good friends, a good life I hope, and incredible recognition for your talent and hard work. That’s quite an accomplishment for a little boy from Chancellor Avenue School. Rabbi Kahan would be so proud of you.”

  When Roth kept waking up and realizing he was still alive—his wish to withdraw cardiac care had yet to be formalized, and he continued to receive medicine for arrhythmia—he became a little vexed. Golier, his health care agent, explained that certain “procedural issues” had to be observed. “Do you mean to tell me, Julia,” he said in a slow, indignant voice, “that I have come to the end of my life only to find out that absolutely nothing is under my control?” One such procedure entailed consulting with his psychiatrist, Richard Friedman, whom Roth assured that he wasn’t clinically depressed or even sad, but quite lucidly capable of a decision to end his life. Finally—on Tuesday afternoon, May 22—he was ready to receive terminal sedation, and said goodbye to Ben and Julia: “I loved your kiddos,” he said to the latter. “They were the joy of my life.” Then he thanked the nurses.