If you are a black writer, professional blacks (that is, people whose business is being black and little else) will require blackness of you, although each critic may favor a different shade; and if you are a woman, the feminists will make analogous demands, and hunt through every page looking for the incriminating pronoun and other signs you have succumbed to something macho; and if you are a Jewish writer it will be the same, though the quarreling groups will perhaps be more numerous and have been at it longer. Philip Roth has been praised by this group and damned by that, and charged and vindicated and hailed and cursed by readers whose real interests were as far from literature as fanaticism will always take you - to the opposite pole. It is a pole Mr. Roth stirs them up with.

So the Zuckerman chronicles continue. Nothing is changed. Every old quarrel has a home in this text. There are references, naturally, to previous books. We are still teased by details taken from the author's life and we are encouraged to search for more, while at the same time the fundamental connection is denied. Sexual expression, phallic power, oral fixation: each is present. Family oppression and familial duties: these too. But above all, there is the presence of the question of what it means to be a Jew. Nevertheless, everything has changed after all. These themes no longer possess our author. He has become their master.

The book begins with the brother's death. Henry, the dentist, has heart trouble. The medicine he is taking for it makes him impotent. Unable to sport with his hygienist any longer, Henry grows desperate and undergoes a bypass operation that will remove him from his medicine, restore his manhood and incidentally repair his heart. His wife chooses to believe it is for her he has run this risk. But soon Mr. Roth will skillfully split the narrative. Henry will unaccountably recover from his death at the hands of the text, and with his revived heart will hasten abruptly away to Israel to take up righteousness and seek the faith. There he will carry a pistol and develop a different, more martial, manhood. It is not heaven he has gone to but Judea. It is not the West Bank he has gone to, but War.

We learn that Nathan Zuckerman, Henry's nemesis, has refused to speak at his brother's funeral. For reasons, of course. Well, wait. Henry will get his opportunity to refuse to speak at Nathan's. These are counterlives but suspiciously parallel tales: woman against woman, marriage against marriage, both or neither brother surviving the knife, as the novel continues its surprises. For Nathan's story could be said to commence with his death, too, at a later date in the text, though from similar causes and resembling motives. Nathan has the same punning problem - a troubled heart -with its emasculating consequences, which means he cannot marry the sweet young object of his present affections and beget the child he finally thinks he wants. So he too will seek a remedy beneath the surgeon's knife and receive his quietus for it.

First, Tale One must wag. (But both may belong to the same dog.) We follow Nathan as he follows Henry to Israel. There he receives doses of rhetoric from every mouth sufficient to cure complacency by killing it. Hope is killed as well. The European Jew speaks, the radical right-wing Jew speaks (he also speaks for the Arabs so as to have some worthy opposition). The anti-Semitic Jew speaks, the peaceful Jew speaks, the Furies have their innings. Like sound trucks in the street, through Nathan they holler wonderfully at one another. The arguments concern Jews, are about Jewishness, about power, and are wholly political. The political and the moral are artfully confused. So this is not a novel about ideas only, but about beliefs - those beliefs that, like bombs, we daily drop on one another. The speakers' rhetoric is their rifle. And the characters establish their character by means of their speech, through the defense, the advocacy, the oppressiveness of their opinions.

This speech does not turn back upon itself as Stanley Elkin's often does, nor are its rhythms so obviously Yiddish as Bernard Malamud's sometimes were, nor is it quite as continuously civilized as Saul Bellow's. It has an insistently forward push toward the next thought, the next feeling, a future desire; it does not normally dawdle in description, or stop for meditative poesy, or paralyze its movement with refinements and indecisions. In this it is urban, male (no matter the sex of the speaker), quick, artful yet blunt, overbearing, mean, street smart but worldly wise. In each case, it seems superb for its purposes and complete.

Every belief is buttressed, not with reasons, but with the crimes of opponents. The gentiles have done thus and so; the Arabs, also, have done thus and so; therefore we, the Jews, should do thus, and thus, and thus and so. Action follows action like an avalanche of rock. Of course resentment stretches as far as one can see sand. And every Jew, except for the secular, corrupt, pluralistic and skeptically minded Nathan, believes it essential that every Jew believe the same as every other Jew, achieve the solidarity of the Wailing Wall. The speeches which give air to these opinions are intensely interesting, passionately convincing and perfectly phrased. Although each view is by its fevered nature a partial one, such is Mr. Roth's skill that the accumulation of these partials makes for an impressive whole. UNARGUED lives may also be worth living, but you won't find them in this book. The two brothers continue to counter each other, appear to oppose each other, as the geography of the novel does, locating some of its scenes in America, others in England's green and pleasant land as well as in the deserts of Judea. Nathan's new love lives in London, and this permits Mr. Roth to parallel the book's vivid earlier scenes at the Wailing Wall with Christmas caroling in a cathedral. He lays the complacent, stupid, almost serene anti-Semitism Nathan confronts in Gloucestershire alongside the louder, less secure dislike for the goyim he finds in Israel. And finds in his brother. And finds in himself, for he is, of course, his brother - at least by now. He has accepted his brother -American middle-class dentist one moment, Israeli militant another - in order to continue to live. Live what? A fictive life?