Roth wants to find a morally rigorous way to claim an American identity. Photograph by Bob Peterson / Meo Represents

Philip Roth’s new collection of nonfiction, mostly writing about writing and about other writers, is called, with Rothian bluntness, “Why Write?” (Library of America). It’s the first nonfiction collection Roth has produced in many years, though some pieces in it have appeared in two previous volumes, “Reading Myself and Others” and “Shop Talk.” Where John Updike, his competitive partner in a half-century literary marathon—in which each always had the other alongside, stride by stride, shedding books like perspiration—produced eight doorstop-size volumes of reviews, essays, jeux d’esprit, citations, and general ponderations, Roth ceased writing regularly about writing sometime in the mid-seventies. Since then, there have been the slightly beleaguered interview when a new book came out, the carefully wrought “conversations” in support of writers he admired, particularly embattled Eastern European ones, and, after his “retirement” from writing, a few years ago, a series of valedictory addresses offered in a valedictorian’s tone.

This turning away from topical nonfiction was not an inevitable development. If our enigmatic oracles—Thomas Pynchon, say, or Cormac McCarthy—weighed in too often on general literary and political topics, they would cease to be enigmatic, and oracular. But Roth, from early on, was a natural essayist and even an editorialist, a man with a taste and a gift for argument, with much to say about the passing scene as it passed. (A 1960 Commentary piece, “Writing American Fiction,” about a murder in Chicago and the impossibility of the writer’s imagination matching American reality, is a classic of that magazine’s high period.) He remains engaged, so much so that a mischievous essayist might accuse Roth of being an essayist manqué, looking for chances to interpolate essays in novels. In “Exit Ghost” (2007), for instance, there are embryonic ones on (among other topics) the surprising excellence of George Plimpton’s prose and the micro-mechanics of cell-phone use on New York streets, and though both are supportable as pieces in a fictional work, they could easily be excised, enlarged, and made to stand on their own. The editorialist in Roth is part of his art even when he’s writing straight fiction. Roth is a dramatic writer inasmuch as he typically begins with an inherently dramatic circumstance or situation: a writer pays a call on his hero, as in “The Ghostwriter,” or is suffering from unbearable neck pain, as in “The Anatomy Lesson,” or has become a woman’s breast, as in “The Breast.” But the succession of events is presented more as rumination and reverie—as irony overlaid on incident—than as “scenes,” something that becomes apparent when they are made into sometimes painfully static movies.

The new collection divides neatly into three parts: the first, mostly from the sixties and the early seventies, is devoted to setting up shop as a writer—announcing themes, countering critics, with the author trying to defend himself from accusations, which dogged him after the publication of “Goodbye, Columbus” and then “Portnoy’s Complaint,” that he was callous or hostile to the Jews. Peace was eventually made—he actually got an honorary doctorate from the Jewish Theological Seminary—perhaps because the novels in the “American” trilogy (“American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist,” and “The Human Stain”) were such undeniably Jewish meditations on ethnicity and morality.

Like any writer worth paying attention to, Roth turns out to be the sum of his contradictions. There is the severity of purpose that he loved in the literary culture of the fifties, one that had him coming to books “by way of a rather priestly literary education in which writing poems and novels was assumed to eclipse all else in what we called ‘moral seriousness.’ ” That’s the spirit that infuses the first third of “Why Write?,” and it is a state Roth has never really abandoned. (Even his announced retirement has the exigency of vocation: the Archbishop makes a point of his withdrawal, whereas most writers just drift away from attention.)

Yet peeking out mordantly from the start is Roth’s natural gift for comedy, which can’t help but rise to the surface even amid the seriousness. And Roth is a comedian, really, rather than a humorist or a satirist. The difference is that you can be humorous or satiric out of intelligent purpose, while a gift for comedy is, like a gift for melody, something you’re born with. Cracking up other kids as an adolescent is one of Roth’s core recurrent memories. In the opening essay in this book, the wonderful “Looking at Kafka,” he makes his fellow Hebrew-school mates sick with laughter by calling the magically-summoned-to-Newark Franz Kafka “Dr. Kishka.”

“Ungovernable” is Roth’s own adjective for comedy, and his readers may recall such long, ungovernable happy exercises in comic voice as the monologues of Alvin Pepler, the distraught ex-quiz-show contestant in “Zuckerman Unbound,” or the impersonation of an intellectual pornographer, obviously based on the late Al Goldstein, in “The Anatomy Lesson.” Meanwhile, the sequence in which Portnoy visits his shiksa girlfriend’s house for Thanksgiving and meets her parents is an extended masterpiece of American standup:

“How do you do, Alex?” to which of course I reply “Thank you.” Whatever anybody says to me during my first twenty-four hours in Iowa, I answer “Thank you.” Even to inanimate objects. I walk into a chair, promptly I say to it, “Excuse me. Thank you.”

Roth’s vision is bleak as bleak can be; there are no moments of Quiet Affirmation. (Zuckerman’s father’s final whispered word to his son is apparently “Bastard!”) But, whereas in Samuel Beckett’s fiction—and Beckett’s name comes up more often in this book than one might expect—the comedy is as dark as the drama, in Roth the comedy lights up the page even when what it illuminates is sordid or sad.

So, when Roth’s second act as a critic arrives, in the seventies and eighties, he becomes less inclined to argue with his detractors—the comedy has already done the arguing for him—and instead puts himself under a sort of self-imposed house arrest, sublimating his own critical opinions and complaints into interviews with writers he esteems. He not only relishes talking to these writers but in some ways identifies with and even envies their ironic detachment—the dignity of their inquiry, the seriousness with which they are allowed to pursue a literary vocation that in America always comes with cap and bells, with the only questions being how odd the cap you get to wear and how loud the bells ring. “When I was first in Czechoslovakia,” Roth wrote in an often quoted line, “it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters.”