In this particular scenario, I was being introduced to Philip Roth, my mother’s favorite writer, whom I had heard her refer to as “the literary lion.” And while I’ve never been particularly starstruck, I flipped when I found out Roth was going to be there. Next thing I know, a mutual friend takes me by the hand, drags me over to Roth, and introduces me to him in this fashion: “Philip. Zis is Periel, she is a grrrreat writer.”

I could not imagine anything more humiliating in the entire world. I wanted to curl up in a hole and die. Adding insult to injury, a friend of Roth’s who was lingering around us, nodded toward Roth and said to me, “So you like him, huh?”

In attempt to salvage whatever miserly bit of self-respect I had left, I said, “Well, I don’t know him, so I can’t like him, but I do like his work.”

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The deliberate pursuit of the Great American Novel has always been a peculiarly masculine endeavor. It is a book, in Mailer's words, designed to "seize the temper of the time and turn it." To attempt to write the Great American Novel is to surmise that you can speak on behalf of an entire, fractious nation. Plus, by all appearances, we're talking about a game of King of the Mountain: Only one winner allowed, and the competition is bruising. The photograph accompanying Mailer's piece showed him standing in a boxing ring, poised to deliver his punches.

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But the shikses, ah, the shikses are something else again […] I am so awed that I am in a state of desire beyond a hard-on. My circumcised little dong is simply shriveled up with veneration. Maybe it’s dread. How do they get so gorgeous, so healthy, so blonde? My contempt for what they believe in is more than neutralized by my adoration of the way they look, the way they move and laugh and speak.

– Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint

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ACCORDING TO THE Toronto Police Service’s Annual Hate/Bias Crime Statistical Report, the city of Toronto saw 174 hate crimes in 2009. This number breaks down as follows: Jews were the targeted victims in 52 of those incidents; LGBT community, 26; blacks, 24; Muslims, 6; 21 other minorities were victimized a cumulative 65 times; and, to round things off, there was a single instance of a hate crime targeting a member of a group recorded as “Non-Jewish.”

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In Roth, we have a great American writer, and also a polarizing one. As one of the judges for the Man Booker International prize in 2011, Carmen Callil withdrew from the panel over the decision to award Roth the prize. Most of the debate surrounding his work involves questions about his greatness and his place in history, but it is also a debate over what some read as misogyny and self-loathing. Or is that insight into the human condition? There’s no shortage of fascinating and critical discussion fodder.

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Last July, Philip Roth, the author of 26 novels and one collection of short stories, told a French interviewer that he had not written a word of fiction in three years and that he did not intend to write fiction again. Roth is 79. He told the French interviewer that he no longer felt “the fanaticism to write” that had driven him for close to six decades, and that he was “tired” of “all the work” that writing demanded. Not only would he no longer write fiction, he said, but he also would no longer read it. (Four months later, in an interview with The New York Times, Roth confessed to having recently read a novel by Louise Erdrich — under the covers, as it were — while adding that most of his reading now was in fact nonfiction.) He said he didn’t feel “any sadness” about his decision. When the French interviewer expressed dismay and wondered if Roth might not take up novel writing again, Roth said that if he were to write another book, it would “very probably be a failure,” and “Who needs to read another mediocre book?” Roth didn’t say how he would “fill the hours” (to use a phrase used mordantly by “the most famous literary ascetic in America,” Roth’s E.I. Lonoff in The Ghost Writer), other than to note that he would help his biographer, Blake Bailey, sort out the facts of his life. (Bailey is the author of a critically acclaimed biography of John Cheever, whom Roth refers to in the French interview as a friend.) It’s hard to imagine the retired Roth taking a cruise in the Caribbean, participating in the onboard karaoke nights — almost as hard as it is to imagine him tweeting — but it is possible to picture him watching sports on TV, especially baseball. In the early 1970s, he wrote a novel about baseball — he called it The Great American Novel, a title that is 95 percent ironic and five percent dead serious — and it is, among other things, the work of a baseball fan. “What,” asks the narrator of this novel, “are the consolations of philosophy or the affirmations of religion beside an afternoon’s rich meal of doubles, triples, and home runs?”

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I knew he was putting on an act, because I’d already heard the opposite from the horse’s mouth. “The Horse” is what I’d called Roth when he and I shared an office space in the late 60s while he was working on Portnoy’s Complaint and I was working on a similar but superior work, Feldman’s Penis. Roth had earned his nickname because he ate a lot of apples and oats, and also because he loved to saddle up with the shiksas. No one knows a writer as well as his contemporaries. Roth and I are as contemporary as they get.

One morning a few months ago, as I sat in my third-floor study in my chateau near the summit of Mount Winchester, my rotary phone rang downstairs. My beleaguered manservant Roger answered it, and came knocking at my door a minute later.

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Indeed. One of the few benefits of anxiety is the creation of fictional worlds or alarming perspectives wherein writers can indulge and play out their fears. This may heal, it may exacerbate, I’m not sure. Nevertheless, a writer’s worries, which come in many flavours, are a boon to readers with similar tastes.

Your first choice is Wolf Solent by John Cowper Powys. What’s the flavour of worry here? 

Powys was one of 11, several of whom also published, and was an extremely sensitive soul. He was born in the 1870s, which meant he suffered the shocks of a new noisy century when he was old enough to worry properly. His medium was more existential angst and self-doubt, offering an antithesis to Whitman’s universe-embracing enthusiasm. Powys started out teaching at girls’ schools in England, which he somehow parlayed into an ongoing gig on the American lecture circuit, where he spent his middle years. He had a wife and child in England and a common-law wife in the US. His autobiography doesn’t mention either of these women, and just barely, his mother. He was an anti-vivisectionist and a vegetarian. He enjoyed long walks and mistrusted airplanes. Depending on whom you ask, he was a notable footnote to 20th-century literature or an overlooked genius.

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The caption doesn’t tell if the woman ever came back for the smithereens. But that’s what the late David Foster Wallace did, during another crisis of love in which the woodwork got the worst of it. Wallace’s biographer, D.T. Max, tells the story in "Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace": "[Mary Karr and Wallace] split up … Soon afterward, he got so mad at her that he threw her coffee table at her. He sent her $100 for the remnants. She had a friend who was a lawyer write back to say she still owned the table, all he’d bought was the 'brokenness.'”

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“I have dedicated my life to the novel,” Roth explained. “I studied, I taught, I wrote and I read. With the exclusion of almost everything else. Enough is enough!”

Yes Roth is hanging up his gloves, and this deviation to a boxing metaphor is by no means accidental: in Roth’s books, everything is a fight. It was the combative, oppositional nature of his storytelling that mesmerized me when I first read him. His characters go after each other with a staggering vitality, clashing conversationally, emotionally, politically, philosophically, and erotically (sometimes all in the same scene), and in their spirited exchanges of outrage and defiance, accusation and desire, Roth moves the reader beyond the simple bloodlust of watching a fight ringside to the dark and disquieting self-revelations that scare us.

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In an interview with a French publication called Les Inrocks last month -- which does not appear to have been reported in the United States -- Roth, 78, said he has not written anything new in the last three years, and that he will not write another novel.

"To tell you the truth, I'm done," Roth told the magazine, in the most definitive statement he has ever made about his future plans. "'Nemesis' will be my last book."

(The interview is published in French; we used an Internet program to translate his quotes into English. We asked his publisher, Houghton Mifflin, for confirmation. They reached out to Roth this morning. "He said it was true," said Lori Glazer, vice president and executive director of publicity.)

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Unlike a substantial percentage of the back-foot club, however, I've got no problem with the Academy's choice, or its history of selecting purportedly "obscure" recipients for the prize. From the handful of articles and reviews I've read in my frantic scramble to get caught up, Mo Yan seems to write the kind of novels I enjoy (and I really did love "Red Sorghum"). "Hallucinatory realism"? "A world of magic, sexual exploitation, ignorance and senseless violence"? Individual stories told against a backdrop of political and social turmoil? Sign me up.

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The week before last, someone posted on my timeline this Open Letter from Philip Roth explaining that my dad was not the inspiration for Coleman Silk, the "passing" professor, in the Human Stain. I considered responding publicly with my own open letter but have decided not to. I'm trying more and more to find that balance between serenity and engagement in my life, and picking a public fight with Phillip Roth didn't seem like it would further either goal in a meaningful way. But neither does it feel completely right to sit quietly on the sidelines. SO FBFs, in case you care, I did have a few thoughts I wanted to share:

1. There was a legitimate reason that many reviewers of the book and movie drew the comparison to my dad's life. Not only are there many similarities between Silk and my father's basic biographies, but many of these details Roth could have known (despite his protests otherwise) by glancing through my father's two memoirs, Intoxicated by My Illness and (especially) Kafka Was the Rage, or Henry Louis Gates’ very long and often-commented-upon piece about my father’s racial identity in The New Yorker, all of which were published in the years prior or during when Roth claims to have started work on the Human Stain. Roth could have also learned them from my dad himself, since their time together was more substantial than Roth describes, including a long walk in Central Park in the 1980s.

2. I think it's completely reasonable that Roth should be allowed to have the last word on who inspires his characters and even obfuscate about the sources if he wants to... BUT I don't think it's reasonable that Roth gets to dictate what conclusions other people draw about his characters, which is effectively what he was trying to do with his objection to Wikipedia's description of the book as "allegedly" having been inspired by my dad. Many many reviewers did make this allegation... Very often if I describe my book about my dad to a new acquaintance, he or she will comment, "Oh, it's just like that novel by Philip Roth..."

3. Roth was in fact “in the company” of a “single member of Broyard’s family”-- at least once. It was November 23rd, 1988, at James Atlas’s annual party on the eve of the Macy’s Day Parade. I was 22, it was my first and last literary party with my dad, and I was terrified. But I have a very clear memory of him pulling me across the room to meet Roth. “Bliss,” my father said, rather pompously, “this is one of our most important American novelists. “ He turned to regard me. “So lithe and pale,” he pronounced. “Like a ghost.” It was a brief encounter--one I'm not surprised that he might have forgotten--but I am sure you all can understand why I haven't.

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I recently petitioned Wikipedia to delete this misstatement, along with two others, my interlocutor was told by the “English Wikipedia Administrator”—in a letter dated August 25th and addressed to my interlocutor—that I, Roth, was not a credible source: “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” writes the Wikipedia Administrator—“but we require secondary sources.”

It seems that Wikipedia's open-source policy lands on the reader's side of the age-old English classroom debate: How much control should an author have over intepretations of his own work?

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Some people don't like fiction and never have. That's quite different from having once read fiction avidly and then, in the fullness of time, giving it up. To judge informally (that is, according to what people tell me when they learn I'm a book reviewer), the latter is far from an uncommon experience. Many former devourers of novels haven't stopped reading, they've just come, like Roth, to prefer nonfiction books on history, science or politics.

Roth, when pressed by his interlocutor, didn't offer much of a reason for the change in his tastes: "I don't know. I wised up ..." he said rather enigmatically. It may be that he's determined that reading other people's novels impairs his ability to write his own. Most writers know what it's like to fall under the sway of a master's voice and to wind up unwillingly imitating it. Self told an interviewer that he couldn't enjoy other authors' fiction because "It uses the same muscles that I use to write with." Still, it's improbable that a writer with a voice as established as Roth would have this problem.

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It took Callil a few days to present a fuller explanation. In the meantime, it was fascinating to watch various commenters respond to the kerfuffle. "I'm discouraged by what I assume is her ideologically inspired illiteracy," Wendy Kaminer assumed for the Atlantic Online. "Is there a terrible scar of monotonous male sexuality in these inventions that limits their power or makes Roth deserve Callil's dismissal?" fulminated Jonathan Jones in the Guardian. "To claim that," he went on, "is to misunderstand what a novel is." Eileen Battersby, in the Irish Times, sniffed, "The sexism and ego of Roth can certainly offend, and obviously bothers the irate Booker judge Carmen Callil."

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