Reading the novel in a restaurant empty but for two young waitresses, I was almost embarrassed to be seen with it. Between the bleak title on the front (the word "exit" in red, as in a movie theater) and, especially, the photograph of the author on the back (steely eyes boring right through you, on through the human condition, and from there to parts unknown) -- well, it just seemed so old school.

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"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa- aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa- aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa- aahhhh!!!!!"

Someone, I'm not sure who -- it may have been Roth himself -- defined the essence of his style by coining the word "diatribalist," a nod to both his preoccupation with the Jewish experience in America and his characters' fierce assertion of themselves. That word ought to find its way into Webster's, with Roth's picture next to it.

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I've always disliked the "greatness sweepstakes" view of literature. Every conversation I've ever witnessed about which works or writers are "truly great" has smacked of philistinism and the sad, threadbare pomposity of a Joseph Roth character reminiscing about the Austro-Hungarian empire. People who talk about this sort of thing are always less interested in actually understanding and appreciating works of art than they are in savoring the ripeness of their own solemnity.

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-- David Levering Lewis, in a 2002 review, quoting Philip Dray from "The Lynching of Black America," where the typical denouement of a double lynching in the Mississippi Delta in 1937 is described.

Great artists can commit great sins of monstrous allegiance, of bigotry, of individual cruelty, but they can commit no greater sin than taking on the mantle of Alzheimer's when addressing major periods in American history. I say that because so much of what has become important in American life since the election of John Kennedy is about deepening the quality of national memory. We search through our files, our documents, our newspapers, our diaries and so on, to somehow know who and what we have been and when we were that repugnant or inspirational or duplicitous or confused. Or whatever. I say that because the subject of this essay is Philip Roth, who has committed a highly celebrated sin against history that would mean nothing if he were not one of our greatest writers, a pure flare of talent out of New Jersey.

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All this makes Roth's latest novel, "The Plot Against America," doubly surprising. The book's premise -- what happens to the Roth family of Newark, N.J., when Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and America descends into an orgy of anti-Semitism -- is an embrace of the catastrophic anxieties Roth once rebelled against. He envisions the kind of America where, like it or not, he is a Jew first. But equally unexpected is the novel's credibility: By setting it in a wholly imaginary history, Roth has paradoxically managed to write his most believable book in years.

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"Passing" is shorthand for "racial passing," and "racial passing" means people of one race (generally African-American) passing for another (usually white). Anybody who's surprised that there's a shorthand terminology for what might seem a pretty unlikely scenario will be more surprised that the phenomenon, with its lengthy history in American culture, isn't all that unusual. Some of the earliest stories about passing reach back to the 19th century, when slaves -- like Ellen Craft, who penned a mesmerizing slave narrative -- used their light skin to escape, and novelists from Mark Twain to Charles Chesnutt mined the subject for their oeuvre.

Passing was a much-hyped subject during the Harlem Renaissance, which produced a plethora of rich fiction about it: Nella Larsen's "Passing," Jessie Fauset's "Plum Bun," Walter White's "Flight." The subject had its Hollywood heyday; melodramatic passing flicks from the '30s, '40s and '50s include "Pinky," "Lost Boundaries" and two big-screen versions of "Imitation of Life" (the latter version, directed by Douglas Sirk, probably still delights the Kleenex industry).

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The new movie version of "The Human Stain," directed by Robert Benton and adapted by Nicholas Meyer, shows how it's possible to be faithful to the particulars of a novel and completely miss its sensibility.

Benton's film isn't a disgrace. It's an intelligent, handsome adaptation that doesn't sand off all of Roth's sharp edges, and it gives you the rare (these days, anyway) feeling of watching a movie made for adults. It would be easier to pan if it were worse. It's almost inevitable when a disappointing movie is made of a great book for people to claim that movies can never equal books. But we've seen enough great adaptations of difficult books (Jack Clayton's "The Innocents," his version of "The Turn of the Screw"; Kubrick's "Lolita"; John Huston's film of James Joyce's "The Dead"; Paul Mazurzky's "Enemies, a Love Story"; Philip Kaufman's version of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"; Lynne Ramsay's film of "Morvern Callar," to name just a few) to see that it's not impossible for a movie to capture a book's particulars as well as its sensibility.

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But don't tell this to Philip Roth.

Over the past 21 years the 68-year-old novelist has published the most ambitious literary series of our time: the Nathan Zuckerman books. Taken together, these eight interlocking volumes -- a trilogy and epilogue ("Zuckerman Bound"), a stand-alone novel ("The Counterlife") and a second trilogy ("American Pastoral," "I Married a Communist" and "The Human Stain") -- form an awe- if not envy-inspiring masterpiece. Who knew that authors could still write on such a Proustian scale? The Zuckerman oeuvre weighs in at 2,215 clothbound pages, not counting Nathan's letter to Roth in the author's autobiography ("The Facts").

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Don DeLillo, a novelist who has made American life his explicit subject for over 30 years, has faced similar charges. Like Stone, DeLillo's fascination with conspiratorial themes has drawn no shortage of heated rebukes. His reputation as an unabashedly private and cerebral literary figure, similarly, has not always endeared him to the literary establishment. He figured prominently in an anti-intellectual broadside of so-called serious contemporary fiction this summer in the Atlantic Monthly. Even tributes have tended to diminish DeLillo, as when Martin Amis trivialized him as "the poet of paranoia." Yet his dozen novels -- and handful of plays, stories and essays -- range widely and assuredly across the broad swath of the postwar American experience. They bristle with brainy asides and lyric rhapsodies rare to modern literature. From JFK to rock 'n' roll, from suburbia to the CIA, DeLillo has crafted defining portrayals of many touchstones in the American psyche.

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These lines don't refer to the affair between 24-year-old Chandra Levy and 53-year-old Rep. Gary Condit, although they do shed light on the often sad story of that familiar pairing between an avid young woman and an incautious, high-status older man. They're spoken by a character in David Lodge's new novel, "Thinks." In fact, literary fiction is a good place to turn if you're looking for some insight into this age-old, but nowadays more complicated than ever, match.

Novelists have long been attracted to the subject of an older married man and his much younger girlfriend. It's ideal literary material: Not only does the pairing push many, many people's buttons, it creates stories that inevitably seep past the boundaries of the relationship itself, raising provocative questions about sex and power, aging and mortality, inequity and exploitation.

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Throughout his career, Roth has refused to prettify lust, refused to deny the desire to possess and even to degrade that, he has insisted, cannot be separated from the male sexual psyche. In "The Dying Animal," Kepesh, who is recalling an affair that began with his beautiful 24-year-old student Consuela when he was 62, remembers putting his penis in the young woman's mouth and explains, "I was so bored, you see, by the mechanical blow jobs that, to shock her, I kept her fixed there, kept her steady by holding her hair, by turning a twist of hair in one hand and wrapping it around my fist like a thong, like a strap, like the reins that fasten to the bit of a bridle." When he's done, Kepesh and the young woman look each other "cold in the eye" and she snaps her teeth at him. His response to this threat of what she could have done and didn't is: "at last the forthright, incisive, elemental response from the controlled classical beauty."

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David Kepesh is 62. He is implacably alone in the world but terribly secure. He teaches only one course now, a seminar called Practical Criticism. But he gets plenty of female students because he's on PBS in New York issuing guidance -- or is it instruction? -- on the cultural things to do, or absorb. He is in the habit of fucking students, but he has a saving primness: He doesn't "get in touch with them on a private basis" until after the final exams and grades. (Never mind if some might suggest that good teaching must involve getting in touch on a personal basis.)

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Life Force by Fay Weldon

Women may reassure their lovers that size doesn't matter, but here is a witty story about the way a well-hung man, the proud possessor of "a magnificent dong," changes the lives of four female friends.

The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing

What intelligent women really feel about sex, politics, men, children, war, love. The greatness of the sexual musings here is that they are intermingled with intellectual and political musings, as in life. Menstruation, orgasm, obsession with unsuitable men -- it's all here, told in the voice of an artist heroine on whom nothing is lost. Do women hate the smell of their menstrual blood? Are they unable to reach orgasm with men they don't love? Doris Lessing wrote about these things first. And best. The intelligence of this book is inspiring.

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With his most recent work, though, Roth has been climbing back out. As in "American Pastoral" (1997), Nathan Zuckerman's attention returns to radical politics, and the new book takes place between the fateful election season of 1948, during the last gasp of Communist influence in American political life, and the era of McCarthyism. Chronicling that important transition is part of Nathan's ongoing inventory of his own psyche, but it also anchors the book in public history.

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