Sept. 16 (Bloomberg) -- Philip Roth, who chronicled the sexual and emotional misadventures of Nathan Zuckerman for almost three decades, may be through, as he's said, with his fictional alter-ego, and yet the hero of his latest book, his 29th, is, like Zuckerman and Roth, a nice Jewish boy from Newark.

Or maybe not so nice.

``Indignation'' concerns Marcus Messner, an intense young man who escapes his increasingly paranoid father in Newark for a small college in Winesburg, Ohio. There he makes a series of missteps that land him in the Korean War. Against that historical setting, Marcus recounts, through a morphine haze, his tragic story, on the brink of death.

Roth, who made masturbation part of the national conversation with his 1969 bestseller, ``Portnoy's Complaint,'' has, over six decades, spun a vast human saga exploring the American condition, Jewish and otherwise, with humor, pathos and disarming honesty.

Since writing ``Goodbye, Columbus'' in 1959, he's picked up every distinguished prize short of the Nobel and rubs elbows with the likes of Dante and Balzac in Harold Bloom's ``The Western Canon,'' which enshrines six of Roth's novels.

I recently spoke with Roth at Bloomberg's New York offices, to which he came, casually dressed and in good spirits, to discuss his art.

`Working With the Knife'

Robert Hilferty: Marcus's father is a kosher butcher, and your book drips with the occupation's bloody imagery.

Philip Roth: There's a lot of blood in the book, isn't there? I got interested in kosher butcher shops when writing this book, so I went to the Orthodox sections of Brooklyn where there are kosher butcher shops just like the ones in my Newark neighborhood as a child. So I was able to have the past come alive in front of me.

Hilferty: Aren't you also ``working with the knife,'' to serve up to us our naked selves, with all the blood and guts attached, to quote your book?

Roth: Well, I think of it as being candid, being accurate, trying to reproduce life as I know it, or as I can imagine it being. But I'll gladly be called a butcher.

Hilferty: How does ``Indignation'' fit in with the rest of your work?

`Hungry for Her'

Roth: It's a short book, like the last few outings have been after ``The Plot Against America.'' It's a very different discipline, and you can't amplify and complicate the way you do in a novel, but you still want the punch. It's probably the same length as ``Goodbye, Columbus,'' strangely, so it makes this circle. It's a story I probably have told in other books, essentially about someone who's trying to become ``free'' -- in this case free of surveillance.

Hilferty: Marcus, an otherwise nice Jewish boy, licks and eats the signature of his beloved, Olivia. What's that all about?

Roth: Means he's hungry for her. She's new, and he has had a sexual experience with her unlike any he's ever had, and not like any he's imagined possible. And then they have a falling out, as it were, and she sends him a letter, and he devours the letter, first with his eyes, his brain, and that's insufficient. Nice Jewish boys don't eat girls' names. That's in the Talmud.

Hilferty: What's the difference between writing now in your 70s than in your 20s?

Roth: Exhaustion. When I began in my 20s, I was fresh and full of energy and determination and single-mindedness. I'm still single-minded, I guess, but not as fresh. And I'm still determined, but not the way a young man is. As you go on, it becomes more and more difficult to begin a new book.

Delusions of Grandeur

Hilferty: How did you prepare your parents for ``Portnoy's Complaint''?

Roth: I invited them to have lunch and said, ``Look, there's this book coming out, and it's going to get a lot of attention. And I just want you to be prepared if you get phone calls from journalists.'' After my mother's death, I visited my father, and he told me what happened after that lunch. He and my mother got into a taxi cab, and my mother began to cry, ``He's having delusions of grandeur!''

Hilferty: What's the relationship between the autobiographical Roth and your fictional doubles, such as Nathan Zuckerman?

Roth: Of course, you draw on your experience, but you draw equally -- no less, probably more -- on your imagination. So you create imaginary lives for your characters that aren't lives you've lived. You ground yourself in your experience because you have to have some floor under your feet, but you leap off of that floor to the imagination.

Hilferty: Is Coleman Silk, the black man who willfully passes as white in ``The Human Stain,'' based on anyone you knew?

Roth: No. There was much talk at the time that he was based on a journalist and writer named Anatole Broyard. I knew Anatole slightly, and I didn't know he was black. Eventually there was a New Yorker article describing Anatole's life written months and months after I had begun my book. So, no connection.

Doubt-Ridden

Hilferty: Are you always working out your identity in each novel?

Roth: I don't think of it that way.... Each time you begin a book, you're an amateur. You're different from the doctor who's been at it for 50 years. I don't have the confidence the doctor has when he opens the door to the waiting room. It's a doubt- ridden profession.

Hilferty: What are you always trying to achieve in each of your novels?

Roth: Vividness is the goal. And density -- both intellectual density and density on the surface. The sentences have to provide a tight web of words and phrases that engage the mind of the reader.

Hilferty: After the publication of ``Portnoy's Complaint,'' it was rumored you were dating Barbara Streisand, which turned out to be false. Did you ever meet her?

Roth: I haven't met her yet. Still trying to arrange it. If you know anyone who can help me, I'd be delighted.

``Indignation'' is published by Houghton Mifflin (256 pages, $26).

Robert Hilferty talks to Philip Roth about ``Indignation'' on Muse TV this weekend. The program airs Friday at 8:30 p.m. and 11:00 p.m.; Saturday at 12:30 a.m., 2:30 a.m., 4:30 a.m., 6 a.m. (on E!), 8 a.m., 10 a.m., noon, 7 p.m., 9 p.m.; and Sunday at 1 a.m., 4 a.m., 7 a.m., 10 a.m., 1 p.m., 4 p.m. (All Eastern Time.)

(Robert Hilferty is a critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this story: Robert Hilferty in New York at rhilferty@verizon.net.

Last Updated: September 16, 2008 11:50 EDT