A Surprising Mid-Life Striptease

By Paul Gray

( THE FACTS: A NOVELIST'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Philip Roth

Farrar Straus & Giroux; 195 pages; $17.95

Shortly before the publication of his novel The Counterlife (1987), Philip Roth remarked, "If I ever wrote an autobiography, I'd call it The Counterbook." Fat chance, or so it seemed at the time. For nearly 30 years, Roth had been hearing accusations that he was merely a closet biographer, that his heroes, whether named David Kepesh, Peter Tarnopol, Alexander Portnoy or Nathan Zuckerman, were simply transparent disguises for their self-obsessed creator. Finding that denials did nothing to stem such charges, Roth responded by heaping coals on controversy. Did some readers accuse him of anti-Semitism? Very well. Roth gave them and the world Portnoy's Complaint, a long hilarious howl of ethnic self-laceration. Were not three novels about Nathan Zuckerman, a Jewish writer suspiciously resembling Roth, finally enough? Roth's answer was to provide still more Zuckerman in The Counterlife, a brilliant demonstration of the magic of imagination and the drabness of mere reality.

Having tirelessly ridiculed the notion that his books are really about himself, Roth has now produced -- an autobiography. It is not called The Counterbook, as it turns out, but The Facts, in which the previously reticent writer points out instances in which his life, after all, has been lugged directly into his fiction. No one who has carefully followed Roth's career could have expected this mid-life striptease, least of all, apparently, its author. His confession begins with an apologia of sorts, a letter to Zuckerman explaining how the book came to be written and wondering "Why should anybody other than me be reading it, especially as I acknowledge that they've gotten a good bit of it elsewhere, under other auspices?"

This, given Roth's previous intransigence on the subject, is a stunning concession. But before the champagne is uncorked and the balloons go up -- Roth has come clean at last! -- a little caution should be maintained. For one thing, the author essentially blames this book on a period of physical distress and mental depression that he experienced during the spring of 1987: "In order to recover what I had lost, I had to go back to the moment of origin." To an inveterate novelist, apparently, telling the truth is a manifestation of disorienting illness. More troubling, there is that letter to Zuckerman at the beginning and, at the end of this presumptive exercise in candor, the imaginary Zuckerman's lengthy and negative critique of what he has just read. The facts may be here, all right, but they are carefully hedged with fictions.

Still, Roth's concern that he is the only one who will care about this book seems unwarranted. It is fascinating to watch a major writer re-examine his life, trying to extricate reality from the tales it later inspired. Sometimes, as he has so often pointed out, the gap between the two proves enormous. Roth describes his Newark childhood in warm, elegiac terms that completely invert the cramped, maddening domesticity endured by Alexander Portnoy: "Our lower- middle-class neighborhood of houses and shops -- a few square miles of tree-lined streets at the corner of the city bordering on residential Hillside and semi-industrial Irvington -- was as safe and peaceful a haven for me as his rural community would have been for an Indiana farm boy."

His college years at Bucknell gave Roth a taste for writing and the sort of sexual imbroglios that would later crop up in his fiction. During his senior year, his landlady discovered his girlfriend in Roth's room and threatened, briefly, to have them both expelled. "It was the mid-1960s," Roth notes, "before I got round to exploiting this painful, ludicrous episode for a scene in my novel When She Was Good." But it was while teaching at the University of Chicago that Roth ran into the elemental force that would permanently shape him as a man and a writer. Her name was Margaret Martinson, although she is called Josie here, and the disaster of their stormy love affair was capped by the calamity of their marriage. She later confessed, Roth claims, to having hoodwinked him by obtaining a urine sample from a pregnant black woman and submitting it to a doctor. Roth writes, "The description in My Life as a Man . . . of how Peter Tarnopol is tricked by Maureen Johnson into believing her pregnant parallels almost exactly how I was deceived by Josie in February 1959." He adds, "These scenes represent one of the few occasions when I haven't spontaneously set out to improve on actuality in the interest of being more interesting. I couldn't have been more interesting -- I couldn't have been as interesting."

In his response, Zuckerman takes a dim view of such passages: "Look, anything is better than My Ex-Wife the Bitch -- I just cannot read that stuff." Other complaints pour forth: "This manuscript is steeped in the nice-guy side . . . Where's the anger . . . And where's the hubris, by the way?" The answer, of course, is that they are all here, if not conveyed by Roth directly then underlined afterward by his fictional counterpart. Despite its sincere attempt to set the record straight, The Facts inevitably shades into fiction. Roth is worth reading not for what happened to him but for what he made of it. And this odd, unexpected book is one of his happier creations.