For several years, I've been hoping for Roth to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but this book may be the kink in a chain of major near-masterworks, if you don't count between-novel novellas like "The Dying Animal" and "Everyman."

With this book, I hope that in addition to the end of Zuckerman, it also marks the end of the priapically-preoccupied-but-impotent-aging-writer-loses-all-he-loves-and-fears-losing-himself-in-the-face-of-his-own-mortality-etc. theme that Roth has so exemplarily explored, but which now feels somewhat wearisome -- although I appreciate how Roth's books, over the decades, have been reflective of his own standing as a young literary upstart, through to his current ranking in the venerable boys' club of veteran American literary novelists.

Also wearisome are Roth's recent rebukes of readers who associate his characters with real-life counterparts, including Roth, himself. I understand the notion that, if a writer's autobiographical details are to be manipulated, the selfsame writer should have the foremost prerogative to manipulate that information to his/her own end, as Roth has done to great effect ("Operation Shylock") or resulting in self-absorbed tedium ("Deception"). However, to say that, for example, E. I. Lonoff is "not Bernard Malamud or anybody related to" that writer, as Roth recently complained, is a bit disingenuous. Those fictional characters in Roth's books named Philip Roth are not Philip Roth or anybody related to Philip Roth, and anybody who thinks otherwise is an idiot who is missing the entire point of the books, right?

In spite of his faults, America needs a writer like Philip Roth, especially in the midst of the Bush Empire. Few writers are as able as Roth at expressing outrage (the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal alluded to in "The Human Stain" and even the welcome Bush-bashing in "Exit Ghost" being a couple of recent examples), and I hope he turns his talents to that direction in future books (he might get that Nobel, after all).

What I value about Roth, aside from the constant interest of his writing, is his honesty. He's a genius of honesty.

His work will live on after those phonies Salinger and Bellow are long forgotten.

"Also wearisome are Roth's recent rebukes of readers who associate his characters with real-life counterparts, including Roth, himself."

This is right on the mark, but the rebukes are not recent. Go back to _The Anatomy Lesson_ (1983) and read Zuckerman's tirades against critic and scholar Milton Appel, who claims that Zuckerman is closer to Carnovsky than he would care to admit. Zuckerman himself seems to realize this, which galls him, and which is why he becomes obsessed with responding to Appel, finally doing so in a pitifully childish tirade by telephone. Roth is aware of his own disingenuous stance, I believe, and his constant denials are more fodder for his writing. All this is indeed wearisome. Roth has shown us what a master he can be when he looks outwards a bit (_American Pastoral_, _The Human Stain_). I'm looking forward to life without Zuckerman as main character.

To this reader, Roth's best, most recent novel is Sabbath's Theater. Nothing touches it for sheer energy and outrageous invention. It seemed to me a direct descendant of the Roth of My Life as a Man--FIERCE.

I am only a mild fan of the recent fiction which to my mind reveals Roth's weaknesses rather than refocuses his strengths. He goes on and on with what to me seem rather pedestrian ideas that really seem to bore the author himself. Roth is only fully engaged by being overtly masturbatory. His god is Onan and his fiction flags, like Zuckerman's penis, when he's praying to another. Name your favorite works--do we all list Portnoy first?

1. Being a son

2. Being a son discovering the self that resides in the penis

3. Being a Jewish son

What are the other important themes that animate him?

Zuckerman is only mildly involving because of his status as alter-ego. And still he's routinely dull--even sex in a Zuckerman book seems only another writerly gambit and not the lifeblood the author seems to want it to be (like it is for Mickey Sabbath).

This book is what one might expect from a dullard like Zuckerman--dullness without even the hint of energy. However, since it's clear that Roth is a master and a genius, perhaps this is simply the final fact of Zuckerman and as he is flagging and failing (and not, sadly, flailing) this is all he can bring to the page. Even the He and She "dramatized" sections are Freshman writing class failures and utterly worthless as writing. They only serve to dramatize the failing author. And again, one might be forced to admit that this is his truth...Zuckerman has been laid to rest because he's got nothing left to give us. Roth however can and will give us more.

has always struck me as more infantile than insightful. Ever since his character whined unconsolably for the big refridgerator of fruit/WASP Princess he feels was wrongfully and maliciously denied him in _Goodbye, Columbus_, the novels have been a roadmap of intense misogynistic loathing, embarrassing horn-dogging and even more embarrassing wish-fulfillment harpooned onto the lives and souls of cultural "others," a sort of Upper West Side version of _Mandingo_ inexplicably marked with literary imprimatur.

May such self-indulgence finally -- finally -- not let the door hit it on its diapered ass.

Your article is balanced, fair minded and clever. But "embarassed?"