The New York Review of Books

And as with Lonoff, there is a sense of the literary lion become, suddenly, the lion in winter. There is, to my mind, a kind of caesura in the Roth corpus that falls exactly in the middle of the 1990s. The first half of the decade saw the publication of two novels that, between them, embody the major themes of Roth’s work. In 1993 Roth published the dazzling Operation Shylock, a brilliant parable about the meaning of identities Jewish, artistic, and cultural: in it, the narrator, ostensibly Roth himself, sets out to find and confront a Philip Roth impersonator who is also a prophet of something called “Diasporism,” an ideology promoting the return of Israelis to their European countries of origin. (All this, to raise the stakes even higher, is set against the trial of the concentration camp guard John Demjanjuk, charged with being Ivan the Terrible, “the butcher of Treblinka.”) The connection between eros and art, always a crucial one in Roth’s fictional world, was subsequently explored, with equally outré gusto, in Sabbath’s Theater(1995), whose protagonist is a one-time puppeteer and self-described “dirty old man.” The former book won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the latter, the National Book Award for fiction.

Since then—starting in 1997, when Roth, then in his mid-sixties, published his Pulitzer-winning American Pastoral (the first installment of a nostalgic trilogy largely about the failure of the American Dream which also included I Married a Communist, a look back at the Fifties, and The Human Stain,in part a sour indictment of political correctness)—the roiling, libidinous energies and aggressive intellectual dazzle of what could be described as Roth’s middle period, the period that culminated in Operation Shylock and Sabbath’s Theater, have yielded more and more to a distinctly elegiac mode. It’s not that the books necessarily have any less vivacity, any less imaginative brilliance (the latter amply demonstrated by the publication, in 2004, of his counterhistorical Nazified America fantasy The Plot Against America); it’s merely that they seem, suddenly, to be written by someone who’s closer to the periphery than to the center of things, who’s looking back in resignation, or anger, or both.

However vivid its depiction of the tumult of Sixties political fervor, the dominant note sounded in American Pastoral was one of idealized nostalgia—hardly untypical for this author—of the Depression-era work ethos recalled from his childhood, the ethos that was frayed during the decade the novel depicts. Similarly, in The Human Stain there was a tension between grouchy disdain for the novel’s present-day fictional setting (politically correct academia, circa 1990) and a golden-toned reverie about the solid values of the past—in this case, the values of an aspiring black railway porter, father to the protagonist, values that have been upended and mocked by the sanctimoniousness of the present.

It occurred to you, as you read these novels and those that followed—particularly The Dying Animal (2001), which finds …