His publisher calls it a novel. Reviewers, reasoning that if it walks like fiction and talks like fiction it must be fiction, also call it a novel. But, like a Hitchcock hero who can’t convince anyone that he’s uncovered a crime, Roth persisted. Last week, in an interview with The New York Times, he reiterated his claim: “The book is true.” Visiting Israel in 1988, he was recruited by Israeli intelligence for a spy mission in Athens. What he did there he won’t say. At the end of the book, “a Mossad operative made me realize it was in my interest to say this book was fiction … But I can tell you that, in substance, this happened.”
Complicating matters, at least some of what Roth describes in “Operation Shylock” did happen. He did go to Israel in 1988 to interview his friend, the novelist Aharon Appelfeld. In the months before that trip, he suffered devastating depression, the result, he says, of taking Halcion. Roth’s friend, William Styron, who wrote about his own Halcion nightmare in “Darkness Visible,” says the two men talked at length about their shared experience. But if Roth was a spy, Styron says, “that was something he kept to himself.” Editor Ted Solotaroff, who appears in a scene of the novel, says he did run into Roth in a restaurant. But Roth wasn’t with an Israeli spy, as he says in the book. He was having dinner with the biographer Judith Thurman. As for Roth’s claim that he was a spy, Solotaroff says, “I don’t suppose it makes it true just because he keeps insisting that it is.” Thurman agrees: Roth’s avowals are all “a provocative game, in the sense that one doesn’t know if it’s true or not.” And Roth “is secretive.” If he were indeed a spy for the Mossad, she says, “he would never let on.”
Though no stranger to controversy, Roth has never courted it. The least likely interpretation of the brouhaha is that he is simply trying to sell more books. Michael Korda, his editor at Simon & Schuster, argues that the novel is meant “to infuriate and puzzle and have you say, ‘Is it real or not?’ He’s played this game in all his fiction: where is the fine line between truth and fiction?”
Some parties have just refused to engage in literary debate. The Israeli government issued a terse “No comment.” Other Mideast experts say the chances of Roth having spied lie somewhere between slim and none. “It wouldn’t be out of the question for the Mossad to do something like this,” says Leslie Gelb, journalist and former State Department official, “although I don’t know what they’d be asking him to do.” Journalist Seymour Hersh, who wrote about Israeli espionage in “The Samson Option,” puts the odds of the Mossad recruiting Roth at “zip.” “There are three good reasons they’d never send him on a mission,” says Hersh. “One: he’s too well known. Two: he’s got a bad ticker. Three: he’d write about it.”
Later in the week Roth seemed to weary of pressing his case. He issued a statement saying, “Ambiguity is in the very nature of the book and cannot be resolved. The reviewers have decided what kind of book it is and … readers should make their own decisions.” Or, as a fictional Roth character once put it, “Literature got me into this and literature is gonna have to get me out.”
