Mortality. With age comes the recognition of a new subject. The only good thing about it is it gives you a new subject. Otherwise, nothing is good about it. Philip Roth has been called the best and most important American novelist in the last 50 years. He won every major American literary award, some more than once. His more than 30 novels, from “Goodbye, Columbus” to “Portnoy’s Complaint” to “American Pastoral,” have given us an indelible picture of who we were — “I’m going with a girl, a shiksa.” — and who we have become. Radical change is the nature of American life. That’s the only permanent thing we have is radical change. Roth’s first book, “Goodbye, Columbus and Other Stories,” published when he was 27 and won the National Book Award. It told of the summer love between a mid-20s Newark librarian and his nouveau riche country club girlfriend. “What did you study?” “I was an English major.” “English?” “Literature.” “Kind of unusual, isn’t it? For a boy.” In addition to the high praise that the book got, there was also a lot of criticism. Mm-hmm. And so you were accused of anti-Semitism, of being a self-hating Jew. That was the laurel that a young Jewish writer got, you know, when you burst on the scene, which is you’re anti-Semitic because the portrayals of people aren’t exactly the rabbinical portrayal of people. “Now, about your nose, what does it cost to get it fixed?” “$1,000 unless you go to a butcher.” I was sometimes furious about it when it was dumb. And it mostly was dumb. I’m still waiting for an apology. I’ll wait a long time, won’t I? In 1969, Roth wrote a book that changed his life. “Portnoy’s Complaint” was a massively controversial, highly erotic and hilarious novel. It was about a sex- and guilt-obsessed young man who rebels against his conformist, Jewish, middle- class background. And it became a gigantic bestseller. “So you like this girl?” “I like a lot of girls.” “And she likes the Jews?” “One. Me.” Roth was aware that readers might think he was writing about his own family. So he tried to prepare his parents. I took them to lunch in New York. And I said: “Look, this book of mine is coming out. And it’s going to be a big hit. And people are going to associate you with the mother and father in the book, though you don’t have very much to do with them. I want to let you know you’ll probably get calls from journalists.” And not until after my mother’s death did I learn from my father that in a taxicab, she began to cry. And he said, “Why are you crying?” And she said, “Because he has delusions of grandeur.” In its first five years in print, it sold more than three million copies. Suddenly, I was in the gossip columns. Barbra Streisand has no complaints about her dates with Philip Roth. And I’d never met Barbra Streisand. I got an incredible amount of mail. In some of the letters, there were pictures of young women, pictures of them in their bathing suits. You know? And their phone numbers. At 13, I imagined that someday I would get pictures of women with their phone numbers on them in their bathing suits. But now it was happening. “Portnoy” became something of a burden for Roth, who felt the public had a difficult time separating the author from the book’s masturbation-loving protagonist. “And with the other hand, she tickles the underside of my cute little weenie. I guess she thinks that’s how you get stuff to come out of the front of that thing.” It turned the conversation away from the book. The conversation turns into — about the book — turns into gossip. Are you this person? Did you do this? Do you do this? So the book is gone. So what you spent every day, eight hours a day, working on for a year and a half, two, two and a half years is no longer under discussion. Writers are writers because they have one thing that other people don’t have in spades. It’s called imagination. That’s the story. “Portnoy” may be the book for which you’ll always be best known. Too bad. I just finished my 30th book and that was my fourth. So what can I do? I was born in ‘33. And I grew up in Newark. It was a very secure and pleasant place. It was largely a Jewish neighborhood. My parents were children of immigrants. My father had a grade school education. My mother had a high school education. I had a brother who was five years older than myself. I was, for a child, studious, hardworking. I loved the game of baseball and spent as much time as I could outside playing it. What were your friends like? All my friends became doctors. I don’t really have a friend who didn’t become a doctor. So that will give you an idea of how upwardly mobile the kids were. After year at Newark Rutgers, Roth switched to Bucknell University, where a growing love of literature led to the first hints of what he would do for the rest of his life. I never imagined I would be a writer. I wrote some short stories. Very sensitive little things they are, too. What was it that made you want to write? I guess the discovery of literature in the classroom, but not until I got to college when it was structured and I had classes and I could speak and be questioned did I realize that I had a passion for this thing. And it did seem to me a high calling. It was free of the commercial motive, at least as I went about it at the time. There was a kind of aesthetic purity, an ethical dimension, which had to do with being true to the words, with being true to the imagined thing. You’ve written that “Mostly I work, about 340 days out of the year.” Why so much work? As far as I know, there’s no other way to do this. I never feel the master of what I’m doing, certainly not when I’m beginning something. If I’m working on something for two years, and in the last few months, I feel the master of it, it’s a wonderful feeling. But in the opening months, the first eight or 10 months of working on something, I feel lost, uncertain. The reason is this book has never been written before. So even though I’ve been a writer before, I never wrote this book before. Why do you look so solitary? How do you balance that against the need for friendship and the need to be with people? The kind of solitude that I require to write creates an occupational hazard. Over the first five years, it wasn’t bad. Then with the first 10 years, it wasn’t too bad. Then with the first 20 years, it wasn’t too bad. And then it started to get bad. Everybody else goes off to work. You know? And you go off to work, but not with others, by yourself, which is your choice. So you then have a great appetite for intimacy. But you still feel you must keep on writing? I wouldn’t know what to do with my brain if I didn’t write. One of Roth’s most enduring characters was a writer named Nathan Zuckerman, who appeared in many of his novels over 30 years. I invented this writer because I had had a strong experience in visiting Eastern Europe in 1972, I think it was. I saw guys living under tyranny, really, and the contrast between how I lived as a writer and how they lived as a writer was very strong. So I wanted to write a book about that. Of course, in the beginning I had no idea he would be a character that would appear in book after book. All of them were about the unforeseen consequences of art. Then Zuckerman emerged as the voice and brain of “American Pastoral,” of “I Married a Communist” and of “The Human Stain.” He’d been an actor in the earlier books. And now he’s not only the actor, he’s the reporter, the imaginer, the intelligence. “What kind of books you write?” “I write about people like you.” Set at the turn of the millennium, with the impeachment of Bill Clinton ever present in the background, “The Human Stain” tells of a professor with a deeply buried secret whose career is shattered in the midst of entrenched American hypocrisy. Well, I began the book with an incident. The incident was that a professor in a classroom uses the word — what is the word he uses? Spooks. Spooks. Right. You see, I’m afraid to say it. Uses the word spooks and is misunderstood by his two black students and suffers as a result. “Mr. Thomas, William Thomas. Is he here? We are five weeks into the semester, and I haven’t even laid eyes on these folks. Can anyone tell me, do these people exist? Or are they spooks?” It happened to a friend of mine at Princeton. He was white. The last man in the world who carried a drop of prejudice in him. And it created a terrible mess in his life. “The only issue is the nonattendance of these students, their inexcusable neglect of work and their sheer chutzpah.” I was engaged by that story and wanted to do something with it. And then I thought, what if the guy is black? And nobody knows it. “To charge me with racism is not only false, it is spectacularly false. And you know it.” It’s a false accusation. And uses to which it’s put lead him to resign from the college. So I just felt that there was something afoot in those late ’90s, just a great explosion of righteous moral logic, which Americans are gifted at. Now I want to ask you about a difficult part of your life, your relationship with Claire Bloom. And she had some very harsh words to say about you — Mm-hmm. — at the end of your relationship and in the book that she wrote. I’m not going to comment about that. O.K. I thought you’d say that. Mm-hmm. But I had to ask you. There are critics who’ve said that in your writing, you’re a misogynist. Mm-hmm. That your female characters are either not fully drawn or portrayed negatively. It’s nonsensical. If my female characters aren’t well drawn, that means I’m just a poor artist. Doesn’t mean I’m a misogynist. It means I’m a lousy writer. People say all kinds of stupid things, and this is one of them. Over the years, Roth’s novels contained many themes. In his final works, though, the one that dominated concerned the most overwhelming and unchangeable aspect of the human condition: death. The death of friends came to me as a startling fact. You don’t need reminders anyway to know that you will die. But the reminders are very strong when these people who you knew in their heyday, you’ve all been friends since all of you were in your heyday, you knew them as energetic, lively. Their disappearance brings home the fact of mortality very powerfully. And it’s got — it’s worked its way into my work, beginning with “The Dying Animal,” I suppose, and “Exit Ghost,” and in “Every Man.” Is there anything you’d like to say that you haven’t said publicly in your life? I think the answer probably is no, because whatever I have to say is in the fiction. And it’s the only way I know how to say things is in fiction.