More in ‘Exit Ghost’

In the mid-1990s, Philip Roth entered the triumphant late phase of his long career, producing a series of big historical novels—American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain. These books, with their detailed recreation of the American past and their blend of social observation with Rothian obsession—about sex, death, and the Jews—showed that he ...

Richard Kliman has the misfortune to be both an outwardly virile young man and a biographer. Either one would be enough to annoy a 71-year-old novelist, aware that his reputation will soon fall out of his own hands, beset by the side effects of a radical prostectomy—impotence, incontinence—and yet still possessing undiminished narrative powers. No, ...