Some 30 pages into Philip Roth's new novel, a character named Henry Zuckerman comes up with a decidedly odd idea. The setting is Henry's dental office in northern New Jersey; the atmosphere shimmers with the sexual tension generated for weeks now by the presence of Wendy, Dr. Zuckerman's new employee. " 'Look,' he said, 'let's pretend. You're the assistant and I'm the dentist.' 'But I am the assistant,' Wendy said. 'I know,' he replied, 'and I'm the dentist -- but pretend anyway.' " This fiction seems indistinguishable from the facts of the matter. But once the artifice begins, so does the fun.
Others can play make-believe, of course; Roth has argued for years that everyone does so all the time. So let's pretend. Philip, the younger son of Herman and Bess Roth, was born in Newark in 1933. He . . . he was born in Newark . . . grew up loving baseball and enjoying summer outings to the Jersey shore. He was a bright student, and after graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he spent a year at the Newark extension of Rutgers University. Then, wanting to see something of the world outside his hometown, he transferred to Bucknell in central Pennsylvania, where he acted in college drama productions; founded, wrote for and edited a literary magazine; and graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in English.
Where next? Well, say he took an M.A. at the University of Chicago and decided to go on for the Ph.D. He met and married Margaret Martinson, the mother of two children by a previous marriage. When his first attempts at short stories were routinely rejected, Roth gave up his literary aspirations and buckled down to his academic career. He earned his doctorate and went on to teaching positions at the University of Iowa and Princeton. The Roths live in suburban Philadelphia, where he is a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His critical books include The Jewish American Novel: Is Enough Enough? and Franz Kafka: The Sit-Down Comic.
It could have happened that way. In fact, a lot of it did. But this refraction of reality is not nearly as interesting as it might be. To punch it up a bit, suppose that Roth's fiction was clamorously acclaimed; that his first published volume, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), won the National Book Award and made the author a name to be reckoned with at 27. Implausible, true, but more dramatic than the other version. And what about that happily-ever-after marriage? Maybe it lasted only a few years before plummeting into an acrimonious separation in 1963 that left Roth deep in debt, thanks to legal expenses, and sent him reeling into five years of psychoanalysis. Awful, but for the sake of the narrative not bad. Right about here a reversal of fortune would do nicely. So our hero wrote Portnoy's Complaint (1969), the novel that made him rich, famous and controversial. Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy were snapped up by Hollywood. And then . . . and then Roth fell in love with a movie star.