Philip Roth

This fall, there will be nothing bigger in bookstores than Hurricane Dan. On Sept. 15, Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol," the follow-up to "The Da Vinci Code" -- which sold 80 million copies worldwide and is said to be the biggest-selling novel ever -- arrives with high expectations; fans have spent six years waiting for Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon's next adventure. As a consequence, perhaps, some publishers have gotten quieter literary fiction on the shelves in advance. Los Angeles novelist Michelle Huneven's "Blame" is about the lifetime of consequences that result from an alcoholic's mistake.

My name is Chris, and I'm a bookoholic. At stoplights, I sneak peeks at novels I've just purchased. Can't keep my fingers off them. Can't resist lifting their paper hems. Compared with some of the things motorists do -- flossing, phoning, French kissing -- a little foreplay with an exciting new book seems harmless enough. Yes, I'm a bookoholic. I have no control. I've read stuff that I'm not especially proud of -- bad stuff, horrid stuff.

Philip Roth has won yet another literary prize, this time the PEN/Faulkner Award for "Everyman," his short, bleak novel about illness and mortality. Roth, who will receive $15,000, is the first three-time winner of the PEN/Faulkner, having received it in 1994 for "Operation Shylock" and in 2001 for "The Human Stain."

Literary awards are old news for Philip Roth, but his latest honor is truly special: the first PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, a $40,000 prize named for the late Nobel laureate and one of Roth's closest friends and literary heroes.

AH, longevity. Without it, we would have to think differently about Philip Roth. Despite the success and notoriety (and, yes, outright brilliance) of "Goodbye, Columbus" and "Portnoy's Complaint," his early career is, frankly, spotty, marked by minor efforts ("Our Gang," "The Breast") and books such as "When She Was Good" and "My Life as a Man" that never seem to find their way.

Roth lets go, moves forward, and doesn't plan to slow down In the fall books issue of the New Yorker there's a lengthy conversation between Philip Roth and Hermione Lee about Roth's new novel, "Exit Ghost." As has been much reported, "Exit Ghost" is the last book to feature Nathan Zuckerman, the literary alter ego who has appeared in nine of Roth's novels, beginning with 1979's "The Ghost Writer."

TOWARD the end of Philip Roth's new novel, "Everyman," there is a scene when the unnamed protagonist meets a gravedigger while visiting a cemetery, and realizes that this man may one day bury him. It's a striking interaction, marked by both the physics and the metaphysics of dying -- which is a tension that motivates much of the book. On a spring afternoon, however, Roth is more interested in the moment as a springboard to a comic riff on literary history.

PHILIP ROTH'S creations tend to travel in schools. Here we have the Zuckerman books, here the Kepesh books, and over there the Roth books -- the most slippery and scintillating of the bunch. Yet his new novel seems to have wriggled free of these taxonomic confines. The protagonist of "Everyman" is nameless. He also emerges from the straitjacket of family life with none of the Houdini-like exertions so typical of his fictional cousins. Can Roth really be starting from scratch? Not exactly.

IT'S fair to say that a certain number of eyebrows were skeptically arched when the Library of America announced plans to publish Philip Roth's complete works. At this point, no one can doubt Roth's importance as a writer, but there are questions of magnitude and proportion. A certain amount of distasteful controversy attaches to his work -- allegations of prurience, Jewish self-loathing and, most frequently, misogyny.

So long, Nathan Zuckerman. Philip Roth's fictional alter ego, a famous Jewish novelist featured in such novels as "The Ghost Writer" and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "American Pastoral," will appear for the last time in Roth's "Exit Ghost," coming out next October.