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He also had lunch with Keith Hernandez, the Mets' All Star first baseman. Describing this event, Roth seems star struck. "I asked him whether he read stories in the papers the next day about the game he'd played in the night before. You know what he said? 'Why should I? I know what happened.' I realized then why I don't have to read reviews of my books. I know what happened."
"If I ever wrote an autobiography," he says, "I'd call it The Counterbook." The prospect seems unlikely. Bare facts alone do not particularly interest Roth, nor does the unfettered imagination. His specialty is the varnished truth. Life offers problems for the writer to rephrase: "The radical restructuring of questions is what gives me my books. My gift is to pretend." The closest he has come to displaying himself directly in fiction is probably in a 1973 essay/story, "I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting"; or, Looking at Kafka. Prospective biographers may imagine this piece to be a trove of information, a crucial key to the Roth enigma. The narrator is called Roth by his friends, he has an older brother, the year is 1942, and the setting is Newark. The only jarring note among these corresponding details is that young Roth's Hebrew teacher happens to be Franz Kafka, somehow risen from his grave in Prague and an immigrant in America. When asked if this narrative is not autobiographical, save for that one outrageous detail, the author confesses at last. "I'll tell you the truth. Kafka was my Hebrew teacher. Only my name is not Roth."