Books: A Tale of Tough Cookies

THE GHOST WRITER by Philip Roth Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 180pages; $8.95

According to the cabbies of American fiction, Philip Roth has a great glove but can't hit the long ball. The fans will always yearn for the big shot that resounds with bulging affirmations and conventional wisdom. Roth even parodied this expectation in The Great American Novel (1973), a 400-page indulgence of his gifts for lampoon and mimicry.

That display now seems to have been a form of primal yuk therapy at the onset of middle age. Roth was 40 at the time. His reputation as a master of literary comedy had been firmly established by Portnoy's Complaint. My Life as a Man (1974) and The Professor of Desire (1977) returned to the sensitive roots of his wit: the conflicts between lust and respectability, art and burlesque, cultural ties and personal freedom, the problem of how to be—or not to be—a Jew. Civilization and its discontents were no longer a set of Freudian trampolines for a spry intelligence; the escape from solemnity required a more studied effort. Oddly, Roth's most exciting work of the '70s remains relatively unknown: two long stories first published in American Review. In On the Air, a talent agent named Lippman attempts to book Albert Einstein as radio's first Jewish Answer Man, only to find that the road to Princeton is a gauntlet of murderous anti-Semites. Looking at Kafka began as a critical essay and gracefully unfurled into a fantasy in which Kafka did not die in 1924 but emigrated to New Jersey where he became Roth's Hebrew school teacher and troubled suitor of his maiden aunt.

The Ghost Writer promises the incredible with the suggestion that Anne Frank is alive and working at Harvard's library. But Roth steps back from the inviting brink of fantasy. He retreats, in fact, to the drab reality of the 1950s, the time of his own spectacular debut as the author of Goodbye, Columbus. The new book retains the look, if not the actual furniture, of autobiography. Goodbye, Columbus is called Higher Education; its author is Nathan Zuckerman who, like Roth, was raised in a middle-class Jewish section of Newark. His story is based on a family embarrassment, a tale of money, lawsuits and maternal sacrifice that upsets his parents and the pillars of their community. "Can you honestly say that there is anything in your short story that would not warm the heart of a Julius Streicher or a Joseph Goebbels?" asks the disappointed judge who had once written a glowing recommendation for Nathan's college entrance application.

What the tribe finds offensive, the literary priesthood hails as original. Zuckerman is granted an audience at the Berkshire retreat of E.I. Lonoff, a celebrated carpenter of ironic Jewish stories. To the young writer, art replaces traditions, Lonoff supersedes all spiritual advisers as the chief rabbi of aesthetic purity, and the visit itself becomes a kind of bar mitzvah at which Zuckerman is accepted as a man and a writer.