SPARRING WITH Roth : While He Plays, Some Critics Say His Obsession With Games Is Getting Redundant

NEW YORK —  After all these years, Philip Roth is still playing games.

They begin minutes after he sits down for an interview, with a wry, bemused look on his face. The author of 17 books announces that he, for one, is not fooled by the ritual of fielding questions and sparring with a reporter.

“I’m pretending to be a writer interviewed by a journalist,” he says, fiddling with the buttons of his tweed sport coat. “Now, maybe you feel like a journalist, but I don’t feel like a writer.

“Everything is a kind of game, isn’t it?” Roth continues. “I walk into the room, you get up and we play at this thing called an interview. All very amusing, if you get the joke.”

Games. Roth has bedeviled readers with them for three decades, beginning with stinging satire in “Goodbye Columbus” and “Portnoy’s Complaint,” and reaching a zenith of complexity in works like “The Counterlife.”

He has also toyed with his critics, seeming to invite their barbs, by building his books around exasperating puzzles. Lately, they go something like this: Is Philip Roth pretending to be a character in the novel, or isn’t he?

The games continue in “Deception” (Simon & Schuster) his most recent work. How else to describe a slender book about adultery and post-coital intimacy that features a beautiful married woman, a philandering character named Philip Roth and an author who resembles the real -life Roth . . . except that he isn’t?

Critics have responded with a barrage of questions: Who has Roth been deceiving sexually? Is the British woman in the book modeled after actress Claire Bloom, with whom he has been living since 1975? And why would he choose to reveal so much about himself--unless it’s all a hoax?

“You know, all of this is such a bore,” says the author, sitting in his publisher’s Manhattan office. “I wrote a book about adultery and people are very sophisticated about that subject until they’re involved in it. So I upped the ante and got a little reckless. I wanted to capture the dangerous sense of being in an affair, and that’s why I put myself into the book.”

Doesn’t that leave him open to questions? Roth shrugs off the thought.

“You’d think people would strike out more independently when writing about my books. Instead of writing what everybody’s been writing for 15 years.”

Make that 30 years. Ever since he won the National Book Award in 1960 for “Goodbye Columbus,” the story of a young Jewish couple’s sexual awakening, Roth has been America’s leading Misunderstood Writer.

In the beginning, he was criticized by several groups for his brilliant but acerbic tableaux of Jewish life, personified best in his 1969 best seller “Portnoy’s Complaint.” Shining a pitiless spotlight on his adolescence in Newark, N.J., Roth turned Jewish Mothers, Shiksa Goddesses and Nice Jewish Boys into household words--to the embarrassment of many.

“They really jumped on me, didn’t they?” says Roth, looking back at the controversy that had him defending his novels in front of one Jewish group after another. “They didn’t understand the difference between sociology and what I was trying to do as an imaginative writer.”

More recently, critics in the New York Times and elsewhere have charged that Roth’s obsession with literary parlor games is getting redundant, even boring. After 14 novels, some of them are weary of his seemingly endless pondering of the writer’s fictional license versus the tyranny of reality.

Roth tartly dismisses such criticism, yet there seems to be a part of him that enjoys the battle. By now, he is one of the nation’s premier writers, a chronicler of modern-day angst who is also a master of the comic voice.

A longtime advocate for the rights of Eastern European writers, he was honored recently by the news that “Portnoy’s Complaint” will be the first American novel to be published by the new Czechoslovakian regime, largely to celebrate that nation’s freedom from sexual censorship.

Roth’s new $1.8-million contract with Simon & Schuster makes him one of America’s better-paid authors, even though his abrupt departure last year from his former publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, raised eyebrows in literary circles. He enjoys a comfortable life, dividing his time between an upper West Side Manhattan apartment and an 18th-Century Connecticut farmhouse.

But the trappings of success haven’t changed him much as a writer. At 57, Roth is more outrageous--and subject to attack--than ever. Whether he’s jousting with critics or feuding with fellow novelists like Tom Wolfe, this is one author who shows no signs of aging gracefully.

“I like playful people, I’m a frisky person,” says Roth, who is graying at the temples these days but still has the same scowling look that has graced his book covers for years. “I’ve always been interested in play, in riddles and ambiguity. I have found all that quite amusing, actually.”

It’s the perfect pose--a writer above the fray, cheerfully hijacking reality. If you don’t like the game, don’t play. But sometimes facts get in the way.

Five months ago, Roth’s father died. Three years ago, the writer nearly had an emotional breakdown, brought on by an accidental mixture of painkilling drugs. Last year, he experienced an excruciating shortness of breath and nearly died before undergoing quintuple-bypass heart surgery.

It reads like one of Roth’s black comedies featuring Nathan Zuckerman, a Jewish novelist forever grappling with guilt, death and a seemingly unquenchable sex drive. Readers have chortled over these scenes, but it is no laughing matter for Roth when the conversation gets personal.

“Let’s get back to the book,” he says briskly. “I nearly had a lollapalooza (of a heart attack), but I didn’t. Lots of guys have this surgery and go right back to doing their jobs. I don’t think that I’ve been changed as a writer by these experiences.”

If anything has changed him, Roth explains, it’s the age-old clash between fiction writers and those about whom they write. As a young novelist of 27, he was surprised by the virulence of Jewish attacks on him when “Goodbye Columbus” appeared. Prominent spokesmen wrote to the New York Times and the Anti-Defamation League, calling him a self-hating Jew.

“What is being done to silence this man?” demanded a New York rabbi and educator in a 1959 letter to the Anti-Defamation League. “You have done as much harm as all the organized anti-Semitic organizations have done to make people believe that all Jews are cheats, liars and connivers,” said another in a vitriolic letter to Roth.

Roth fought back, saying he had a perfect right--even an obligation--to write about his own people. Moreover, he had no responsibility to get the “facts right,” but was free to explore his own creative imagination.

None of those beliefs has changed, Roth insists. Yet he has come to realize that such cultural-literary conflicts are inevitable.

“I absolutely understand people who might say, (one) can’t write about these things, because they’re too close to real life, too intimate, and they’re not for publication,” he says. “But the writer is different. He says, ‘I’m a gangster, and it is for publication. I’m a gangster of the First Amendment.’ ”

Today, Roth’s depictions of Jewish life seem every bit as sharp as when they first appeared. He was the first major Jewish-American writer to discover the comic and literary possibilities in his own world, the “tribal secrets . . . the rites and taboos of the clan,” as he called them.

Now, 30 years later, the Jewish controversy seems to have subsided. Perhaps it is because the generation which attacked him has grown older, and younger readers are either more sympathetic to him or indifferent, Roth says.

But new criticism has come from reviewers, who say that books like “Deception” rehash the themes that Roth has been exploring since 1979. As the New York Times put it, many readers “must surely be growing impatient for the author to stop analyzing his imagination and start exercising it, if he hasn’t dissected it beyond repair by now.”

Roth brushes off such arguments. He’s heard them before, and declines to comment. But the urge to explain his latest book proves irresistible, and he begins to talk earnestly about a work that he believes has been misunderstood.

Instead of focusing on “who is Roth” or “where is Roth” in a maze of adultery, he says, readers should view “Deception” as the portrait of a woman--or women--who are trapped by circumstance and struggling to get free.

Stylistically, the novel is also a major departure, featuring spare, staccato duets between unidentified voices. Most important, he adds, the book is about listening--and talking--as a key to erotic intimacy.

“That hasn’t really been talked about,” Roth notes. “I don’t think there are more than four real critics in America, but there are lots of reviewers. So if you’re talking about what Mr. Nobody says or Mrs. Nobody says, who cares?”

When the subject of novelist Tom Wolfe comes up, things get chilly.

Last year, Wolfe wrote a controversial essay in Harpers magazine contending that American fiction writers were avoiding the reality of contemporary life. He argued that they should write more books like his own “Bonfire of the Vanities,” a broad-ranging satire about class and politics in New York City.

In the essay, Wolfe mentioned a speech that Roth had given in 1960, in which he claimed that the drama of everyday life was overwhelming fiction writers. As a result, Wolfe claimed, Roth had encouraged fellow writers to look inward and avoid the issues of the day.

“It’s so stupid, it doesn’t even bear mentioning,” says Roth, who fired off a sharp retort to Wolfe in Harpers and is still irked by the exchange. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s as simple as that.”

How could anyone say the writer of “Portnoy’s Complaint” was anything but a realist? Roth complains. Who can take seriously a novelist who tells other authors to write like him? And why has Wolfe received so much attention?

“It’s a measure of how crude literary discussion has become that this piece of Tom’s, which is extremely crude and stupid, should be at the center of the only literary debate I can remember happening in the last 10 or 15 years,” he says with a laugh. “Let me tell you, standards have fallen.”

The interview draws to a close and Roth lightens up when he talks about his recent return to full-time residency in America. For 11 years, he had been spending the majority of his time in England, but came home two years ago.

At the conclusion of “Deception,” a male character exults in his return to New York after years of living in England, saying: “I understand something. I take long walks in New York, and every once in a while I stop and find I’m smiling. I hear myself saying aloud, ‘Home. . . .’ ”

The character continues: “Jews with force, I’m talking about. Jews with appetite. Jews without shame. Complaining Jews who get under your skin. Brash Jews who eat with their elbows on the table. Unaccommodating Jews, full of anger, insult, argument and impudence.”

For once, Roth concedes a parallel between his life and his writing. Like his character, he is delighted to be back in the tumult of Manhattan.

“It has something to do with the permission that’s given people here, which can wear you down after awhile,” he says. “People are permitted to be so exhibitionistic, so impudent, and that appeals to me.

“Like anything else, it’s a form of play. It’s theatrical. And for me, that’s always been pure entertainment.”