What if there had been a Jewish version of Henry James? In this marvellously controlled ironic novella [The Ghost Writer], Philip Roth has invented a bristlingly vivid Jewish James called E. I. Lonoff, a selfless patriarch of 'sympathy and pitilessness'. Then he unleashes a disciple on Lonoff, a young Jewish and rather Rothian writer who is comically eager to learn the lesson of the master. After a day of observing the 'terminal restraint' that passes for life in the Lonoff dacha in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts, young Nathan Zuckerman has learned a different lesson from the one he set out to get: one man's 'madness of art' is another man's poison.

In Henry James, the 'madness of art' must sponge out the bright colours of mere life. James's lesson is brutally clear: a man must choose either life or art, he can't have both. Roth, however, brilliantly...