A Complaint: Double Vision

By Paul Gray

TITLE: OPERATION SHYLOCK: A CONFESSION

AUTHOR: PHILIP ROTH

PUBLISHER: SIMON & SCHUSTER; 398 PAGES; $23

THE BOTTOM LINE: Who is that man pretending to be Philip Roth? Philip Roth tries to find out.

The subtitle ought to provoke knowing smiles from Philip Roth's devoted readers. A confession, from this guy? C'mon. Throughout his career, which is now in its 36th year, Roth has reacted with high exasperation to suggestions that his novels document his life or reveal anything about him except his imagination. It hasn't helped his case, of course, that he has filled his best books (among them, Portnoy's Complaint, My Life as a Man and The Ghost Writer) with heroes who, like him, are brainy, funny, Jewish men -- usually writers -- with intense memories of Newark, New Jersey, childhoods. But Roth has argued all along, most elaborately and entertainingly in The Counterlife (1987), what ought to be -- and for some peculiar reason isn't -- a simple point: that fiction and reality are different.

So, naturally, the central character and narrator of his new novel, Operation Shylock, appears under the name Philip Roth. And he is not the only one to do so. Another man in the book calls himself Philip Roth. This second Roth is in Jerusalem, where the first Roth plans to visit early in the novel. He is giving interviews and drumming up support for the movement he calls Diasporism: a plan, in the hope of averting a second, Arab-engineered Holocaust, to move all the Jews of European descent out of Israel and back to the countries of their ancestors.

The narrator, then, is real -- whatever that might mean in a work of fiction -- but is the other Philip Roth some sort of con man or scam artist or lunatic exploiting a reputation not his own? Or might it be the other way around? Even to frame such a question is to play and plunge helplessly into Roth's game.

And a lot of fun it turns out to be. Operation Shylock is not at all the desiccated exercise its premise -- doppelgangers, Identity vs. the True Self -- might suggest. The author admits that the subject of real or imaginary doubles has been pretty thoroughly and bookishly exhausted by everything from Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray to Vladimir Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: "I knew all about these fictions about the fictions of the self-divided, having decoded them as cleverly as the next clever boy some four decades earlier in college. But this was no book I was studying or one I was writing . . ." Here a slight demurral seems appropriate: this is obviously a book that Roth is writing. His claim to the contrary is part of the trap he sets for literalist readers.

Roth the author goes to Israel, as planned, to conduct an interview with the (real) author Aharon Appelfeld. (This exchange was actually published by the New York Times in February 1988.) He also drops in on the trial of John Ivan Demjanjuk, the Cleveland autoworker accused of being the infamous Ivan the Terrible at the Treblinka death camp . When he first catches sight of the man who either did or did not commit atrocious crimes, Roth muses, "So there he was. Or wasn't."

This case of conceivable mistaken identity reminds him that he cannot keep his mind off . . . Philip Roth. Not himself, this time, but the other one, the one somewhere in Jerusalem successfully masquerading as him. Inevitably, the two meet; "I can't speak," says Roth the nonauthor. "It's you. You came!" Improbably, as far as the narrator is concerned, they wind up sitting down together in a hotel restaurant for lunch. Roth the writer admits to himself that the other Roth looks eerily like him, down to minute details: "There was a nub of tiny threadlets where the middle front button had come off my jacket -- I noticed because for some time now I'd been exhibiting a similar nub of threadlets where the middle button had yet again vanished from my jacket."

An experience like that would give anyone the willies. So would receiving a check for a million dollars from an old man who thinks he is handing it to the other Philip Roth, founder of Diasporism. Perhaps that explains why Roth the author keeps the check. Nerves may also account for his impulse to start talking as if he were the founder of Diasporism: "People ask where I got the idea. Well, I got it listening to the radio. The radio was playing 'Easter Parade' and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then he gave to Irving Berlin 'Easter Parade' and 'White Christmas.' The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ -- the divinity that's the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity -- and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow."

Roth has not riffed with quite this comic abandon since Portnoy's Complaint. And the social and historical range of Operation Shylock is broader than anything the author has attempted before. The increasingly frenzied and farcical minuet between the two Philips takes place against a complex background of contemporary scenes and questions: the evolution of Israel and Zionism, the grievances of displaced Palestinians, the lacerating choices that must be made between group solidarity and individual freedom. Nearly everyone the narrator meets has fallen prey to an obsession of one sort or another -- he is in the Middle East, after all -- and during the course of the novel, so does he. They are preoccupied by history, he by himself. The peculiar genius of Operation Shylock is to portray how such dementias can be fatal but rarely serious.