Warning: The authenticity of certain statements in this story cannot be verified, considering that their source is Philip Roth, an incorrigible fantasist and perpetrator of outrageous fictions.
The senior dot-to-dot columnist for Chicago’s daily tabloid predicted a huge turnout of the city’s “glitterati,” and he turned out to be right. The columnist himself was there, looking more glittery than literary, conspicuously seated at the elbow of the royal visitor, Philip Roth, who was briskly inscribing copies of his new book, “Operation Shylock: A Confession,” and many old ones, particularly “Portnoy’s Complaint,” at Stuart Brent’s Michigan Avenue bookstore.
Billed as Roth’s “first book signing ever,” the premiere drew a lengthy queue of autograph hunters and handshakers that spilled out the front door and onto the slushy sidewalk. As Roth toiled dutifully at the rear of the store, bookseller Brent ushered several dignitaries and friends-novelist Richard Stern, newscaster Walter Jacobson, architect Stanley Tigerman-to the head of the line for a private audience with the veteran author/novice autographer.
With the crowd and the wine ebbing and flowing around him, a joyful Brent proclaimed this to be the biggest crowd he’d ever mustered for an author, surpassing that for Daniel Barenboim a few months earlier, and the blowout for Nelson Algren, more than 40 years earlier, for the publication of “The Man With the Golden Arm.” To pack a bookstore, Brent exulted, “It proves that you don’t have to have Madonna.”
Unlike such celebrities and publishing aberrations, Roth brought to the party his lofty reputation as a writer (and the leftover notoriety from “Portnoy’s Complaint,” 25 years ago) but little real glitter or stardust. Thinner and less hirsute than in the vintage photo on the book jacket, wearing a dark suit and rimless glasses, the novelist looked, in the harsh appraisal of one fan, “like a dermatologist.” The glamor was discreetly provided by Roth’s wife, actress Claire Bloom, who waited in the wings while the author scratched and scribbled, shook and smiled for the camera.
Decompressing from his bookstore marathon the next morning, in a secluded corner off the lobby of the Drake Hotel, Roth explained that he happened to be coming to Chicago to visit his brother, Sandy, who lives in the area, and agreed to do the autographing as a favor to Brent, a booster and friend.
“I had no impression,” he said of the bookstore ritual. “I just sat in the corner and people came by with books to be signed, not just the new one but 10 or 15 old ones. You do get a strange sense of the consequences of your work.”
Roth may be a stranger to autographing parties but not to the city, having been both a graduate student and a teacher at the University of Chicago, the scene of his novel “Letting Go,” which mildly scandalized Midway academia in the early ’60s.
As long as he was in town, Roth said he wanted to clear up a public misconception about “Operation Shylock.” Habitually categorized as an autobiographical writer, whether in the fictional disguise of Alexander Portnoy or Nathan Zuckerman (who figured in “The Ghost Writer” and three or four other novels), Roth had apparently dropped even that flimsy masquerade for “Operation Shylock.”
His “major new novel” (as the publisher, Simon & Schuster, describes it) features not one but two characters named Philip Roth: the genuine Philip Roth and a fake Philip Roth, who shows up in Israel at the same time as the author. To the great indignation of Roth, his impersonator publicly advocates a provocative “Diasporism . . . particularly the resettlement of Israeli Jews of European background in the European countries where there were sizable Jewish populations before World War II.”
It’s a `confession’
Contrary to his publisher, however, as well as the reader’s note at the conclusion (“This book is a work of fiction”), Roth insisted that “Operation Shylock” is not a novel. “I call it a `confession,’ ” he said, noting the subtitle, “and it has a very powerful basis in fact. Powerful enough for me to do little more than record and remember. . . . I’d say it’s 99 percent fact. Make that 95 percent.”
Oh, really?
“You can be as skeptical as you like,” Roth said. “I’ve got this reputation as the boy who cried wolf, and every journalist I’ve spoken to has challenged me on this. But it ain’t a trick. I did not invent, except to make changes essentially for legal reasons.
“No one would believe me when I said I hadn’t mined my biography for `Portnoy’s Complaint’ and the Zuckerman books,” Roth added. “Now I’ve finally written a book which is based solidly on rather extraordinary fact, and everybody says it’s fiction.”
“Everybody” includes Roth’s publisher. According to a source at Simon & Schuster: “As far as we’re concerned, the book is fiction. Whatever he’s saying in Chicago, he didn’t consult with us. We certainly accept that certain events in the book may have happened, which is not unusual with fiction. But we published the book as fiction with his full knowledge.”
Even with such earnest assurances, it was difficult to take Roth at face value. In the shadows of the hotel lobby, he seemed to be grinning impishly, almost perversely, recalling-intentionally perhaps-the reference to Poe’s “Imp of the Perverse” that he’d made himself in a recent New York Times essay launching his book.
A maestro of “Jewish mischief” (as he also acknowledged in the article), Roth was surely up to old tricks in a new guise, finding yet another mischievous means of commanding the spotlight (and confounding the media) by claiming that his latest “novel” was the whole and nothing but the absolute, honest truth, no kidding, and not just another trip into his narcissistic hall of mirrors.
The improbable plot
Confronted with persistent looks and expressions of skepticism, Roth spoke of his “career predicament,” explaining: “Since my reputation has been established as a writer who can’t possibly make anything up, I wonder how they think I could possibly have made this up. . . . I’m not playing any games with you. I tell you that these somewhat preposterous events occurred.”
In which case, let’s pause briefly to review only a few of the preposterous events that occur in Roth’s confession:
Recovering from a bout of depression brought on by the sleeping pill Halcion, Roth goes off to Israel, where he encounters the Roth impostor (a k a Moishe Pipik), who has terminal cancer and a penile implant, and his mistress, Jinx, a member of Anti-Semites Anonymous.
There follows a convoluted series of seriocomic misadventures, which climax with Roth being kidnapped by an uncommonly paternalistic and garrulous spymaster, Smilesburger. Calling Roth “that marvelous, unlikely, most magnificent phenomenon, the truly liberated Jew,” among many other effusive commendations, the agent offers the author $1 million to carry out the Roth impostor’s plans for the “de-Israelization of the Jews” (a scheme that does have a “mad plausibility,” Roth agrees, but finally boils down to “puerile wishful thinking”).
Given such a dizzying mixture of the real and the surreal, not to mention Roth’s track record for literary duplicity and pranks, who but the most gullible could possibly react to the news that “Operation Shylock” is 95 percent true with anything other than amused disbelief?
“It’s a perfectly legitimate response,” Roth said. “As I said to Claire this morning, `How can anybody who reads the front page about the World Trade Center bombing tell me my book is preposterous?’ The story reads like Conrad’s `Secret Agent.’ This guy went back to get the deposit on the van he used to bomb the trade center. It’s insane. And it’s not fiction. This preposterousness is the reality.”
That’s also true of his impostor, Roth said. Although the double is an established tool of fiction writers, in such works as Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” and Saul Bellow’s “The Victim,” the one who appears in “Operation Shylock,” pretending to be Philip Roth, is a creature of fact, not of fiction, he said. “He looked more like me than my brother, and we have a very strong resemblance.”
Roth hopes he has put his look-alike permanently out of commission with “Operation Shylock.” But then a guest at the Chicago autographing party thought he spotted him in the crowd, Roth said, a sighting that turned out to be a case of mistaken identity. “It was my brother.”
