So it didn’t matter-or didn’t matter to me, at least-that every other book was forgettable as with Lawrence, the great books and the minor books were all part of the urgency, the need to represent and the need to investigate. (“Fuck the laudable ideologies,” sings Mickey Sabbath.) Like all great comedy, it brings the dead back into an eternal comic present. And comedy does the same, which is why we are so moved when Nathan Zuckerman, in “The Ghost Writer,” imagines telling his parents that he has made good by marrying Anne Frank, who has somehow survived the Holocaust-it’s a great, rude, risky joke. Desire expands life, and holds off death. Roth’s explorations were ultimately metaphysical: What is a self? Don’t we invent ourselves, and isn’t this invention the very definition of life? What is desire? What is Jewishness? How should we live, and how should we die? Roth’s men (yes, all men) live their lives suspended between “the fantasy of endlessness” and “the fact of finitude,” as he put it in “Sabbath’s Theater” (the book that, increasingly, seems to lie at the very center of his work). Roth, that vitally dirty-minded man, was very pure. Purity of heart is to will one thing, says Kierkegaard. He lived with it and through it, like any demented virtuoso. The novel was the only instrument that mattered.

But he was essentially a monomaniac, a fanatic of fiction. His memoir of his father, “Patrimony,” is a beautiful book. Roth wrote some essays, and some of them are really fine. He would not cease from exploration he could not cease and the varieties of fiction existed in order for him to explore the varieties of experience. But I admired him above all other living American novelists because his life and work had the only quality that really matters: that of unceasing necessity. Lawrence, who seems Roth’s truer precursor in every way.) You could find him at times repetitive, only intermittently good you could certainly find his increasingly conservative politics resistible, and hope that, one day, he might represent relations between men and women as something other than purely erotic. (In the English tradition, that writer would be D. Maybe you have to go back to the very different Henry James to find an American novelist so purely a bundle of words, so restlessly and absolutely committed to the investigation and construction of life through language. And didn’t many of us assume that the public retirement was merely private retrenchment-that Philip Roth was still writing every day at home, because he could never not write? More than any other postwar American novelist, Roth wrote the self-the self was examined, cajoled, lampooned, fictionalized, ghosted, exalted, disgraced, but above all constituted by and in writing.

Patrimony by philip roth