At the age of forty-six, Philip Roth has relented. He has written a short and touching novel, The Ghost Writer, which is remarkably free of the zeal for settling scores that soured so much of his work. In place of the animosity he lavished on nouveau-riche vulgarians in Goodbye, Columbus, on repressive Jewish mothers in Portnoy's Complaint, and destructive Gentile wives in My Life As a Man, Roth has drawn the characters in The Ghost Writer with delicacy, compassion, and a tender respect for their honorable intentions….

Roth has endowed [Nathan Zuckerman, the troubled young Jewish writer,] with cultural sophistication and a fervent sense of literary vocation…. More important, he is obsessed … with the classic tension that plagues writers—the discordant demands of art and life.

Life has recently been battering Nathan's conscience because his father, after reading a long story his son has written about an ancient...