OPERATION SHYLOCK: A CONFESSION Philip Roth Cape, £14.99
When times are tough, novelists recycle their journalism, and Jews fabricate messiahs. Philip Roth has succumbed extravagantly to both temptations. His 18th novel flourishes long chunks of a New York Times interview with the Israeli writer, Aharon Appelfeld, as well as press-gallery jottings from the John Demjanjuk trial.
Other characters in his cuttings file include the jailed American-Jewish spy, Jonathan Pollard, and the murdered American-Jewish invalid, Leon Klinghoffer, whose travel diary is submitted as some kind of evidence, only to be exposed as fake. There are walk-off parts, too, for Lech Walesa and Yasir Arafat, in what amounts to an economy-class travelogue of the disputed borderline between fact and fiction, televised actuality and surreal recollection. Roth's principal invention in this flickering cast is his own double, an eloquent impersonator who goes by the name of Philip Roth and lives in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem preaching a gospel of "diasporism."
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The redeemer will come out of Zion, he proclaims, to return his people, the Ashkenazi Jews, to their natural habitat in East and Central Europe. Walesa likes the idea. The Pope approves. Arafat is exultant. What happens to Jews of Sephardi and West-Rhenish origin does not concern our liberator. His solution has the beauty of simplicity: not to say, finality. There is an abundance of herrings— more red than schmaltz — in this ample spread, as Roth lays on mystification and dissimulation all the way down to his final, 400th page where he declares the book "a work of fiction" with customary disclaimers, and then adds: "This confession is false."
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