There’s something truly captivating about reading Operation Shylock. It’s almost like observing a spider meticulously spin its web. Roth takes one thread of the plot and weaves it into his structure, then he adds another, and another, and another. At first, if you don’t know what he’s up to, it seems chaotic and purposeless. But as the design gradually comes together, you’re still not entirely sure how much of the completed web was intentional and how much was an accident of instinct. And what are these designs for? Of course, Roth explores his classic themes of Jewishness, metafictional self-awareness, and the blurry boundaries between fiction and reality. But what exactly does he manage to catch with his web?

Much like a real web, Roth’s plot is rather delicate and complex. It begins with his psychotic break after a surgery that had him on sleeping pills which were later recalled. As he recovers, he discovers that there’s another Philip Roth in Israel advocating for a Jewish Diaspora, returning Jerusalem to the Palestinians and escaping the potential wars. Roth travels to Israel under the guise of interviewing Aharon Appelfeld, but while there, he gets involved in various situations. He finds himself in the trial of John Demjanjuk, meets up with his old friend George Ziad, confronts his doppelganger and the doppelganger’s ex-antisemitic lover, all against the backdrop of the First Intifada.

Despite having multiple strands of plot, it takes a long time for things to really get going. This is partly due to Roth’s querulous tone and his insistence on having his characters speak in long monologues that often feel more like hectoring essays than natural speech. However, when Roth focuses on his characters and the dynamics of the situations, he has an ear for vibrant dialogue and caustic humor that makes his characters come alive on the page. But as his career progressed, he sometimes fell into the trap of making his characters mere mouthpieces for his philosophical views on the Jewish issue. In Operation Shylock, especially in the early parts, it often feels more like a polyphonic essay than a novel, with the plot and characters fading into the background behind walls of text. Roth, being highly self-aware of his metafictional approach, recognizes this. Towards the end of the novel, his “character” is kidnapped by the mysterious Smilesburger, who mistakes him for his doppelganger and gives him a lecture on Chofetz Chaim, making one think that Roth is pointing the finger at himself.

If the novel is a bit light on the “Operations” of the plot and heavy on the “Shylock”-themes of Jewishness, it’s still arguably Roth’s most complex exploration of these themes. The device of “the double” is an old trope in literature, but it’s rarely been as fitting as it is in this work, where there are multiple sides to every issue, pulling the fabric of reality in different directions until it starts to tear. As Smilesburger says later in the novel, the divisiveness within the Jewish community is not just between individuals but also within each individual Jew. In this sense, the opening dealing with Roth’s own sanity is a psychological portrait of these conflicts in miniature, showing how fragile our sense of self can be.

When Roth finally catches up to the imposter, he discovers that he is little more than another version of himself. The imposter, named Moishe Pipik or Moses Bellybutton, had (supposedly) worked as a private investigator, was a huge fan of Roth’s work, had terminal cancer, fell in love with his nurse, and decided to devote his life to the Jewish Diaspora. Roth’s naming of him is both a bit of childish nostalgia and naivety, as if naming things can give him control over them. But after their confrontation, Roth feels that he has lost to the imposter’s version of himself and what his life should be. The imposter chastises Roth for not doing more for the Jewish cause than just writing fiction, highlighting Roth’s ongoing struggle between imaginative fictional indulgence and tangible factual engagement.

The trial of John Demjanjuk is another strand of the plot that is pulled from real life. Roth is forced to question the relationship between the mild-mannered Demjanjuk and the brutal Ivan the Terrible. He imagines three distinct visions of Demjanjuk, showing the complexity of trying to determine the truth. This contemplation raises many questions about the reliability of eyewitness testimony, the trustworthiness of second-hand accounts, and the role of art and artifice in capturing reality. It also makes one wonder how much our psychological biases can distort the truth and how much of history is just tall tales compared to the giants of mythology.

Amidst the First Intifada protests, Roth finds himself lost and powerless to understand the enormity of the situation. He realizes that in a world where everything is words, it’s difficult to have mastery and truly understand what’s going on. The complexity of the situation constantly puts one in danger of losing oneself in the attempt to put reality into words. However, despite any narrative failures in this novel, Roth’s greatest success is in his ability to convey the complexity and confusion that many of us feel when confronted with these incomprehensible issues of identity, nationality, history, religion, and our own attempts to distinguish the truth from the fictions our minds create. If by the end Roth is less of the masterful spider and more like the clumsy fly caught in his own web, it also shows how much this is true of us all.

A strange novel that initially seems mainly a narration about the "double", but then reveals something different.

The entire book is centered on Israel and the Jews. Something that might seem tiresome after a while, but not to me: after all, if you read Roth, you expect the "Jewish" theme (unless it's your first book by the author, in which case Operation Shylock is not recommended).

There's also something else, anyway. The theme of the "double" is indeed there, as well as a very intriguing and refined metanarrative game.

I love Roth's writing, the monologues, the digressions, the prolixity.

However, this doesn't seem to me among his best novels. It has at least two "flaws" (in my opinion) that leave me perplexed.

The first: I think the comic potential wasn't exploited as Roth usually knows how to. Given the plot and the author's humorous talent, I expected a lot of laughs. Instead, the effective comic scenes are actually few.

The second: the redundancy. Often the arguments and the type of situations are repeated. I'm fine with the author going on at length if the author is Roth; but repeating himself so much leaves me a bit perplexed.

It must be said that there are very intense moments, as well as shocking reflections, and the ending is brilliant. But I expected something better.

As always in the books of Philip Roth, the themes addressed are multiple, overlapping and intertwined. In this novel, even more than usual, there is confusion, although the central theme is always the same: what does it mean to be Jewish, an American Jew born of a generation that did not experience the Holocaust, like Roth, or a Jew born in the State of Israel.

One wonders: are the Jews a people living in a territory with its own legal order, so do all the constitutive elements exist for the existence of an Israeli state? Certainly... but in what way did they obtain that territory on which they built their state? By violently tearing it from the hands of the Palestinians, fighting every day tooth and nail, with an astonishing force that is their inheritance from the past against anyone who threatens Israel: is this a "justified" violence? Is it right - and above all is it safe for the survival of the Israeli state - to lock the Palestinians in a ghetto, the same one in which the Jews lived locked up in the past?

Or are the Jews a scattered community of people united only by a culture and a religion that brands them as different,注定 to have no homeland, to be chased away from any place where they live, eternally invisible to other races, like Shylock, the hateful Jewish usurer in "The Merchant of Venice", who appears on the scene uttering two words that will mark in the future all the contempt that the Christian West will have for his people: "Three thousand ducats?"

Philip and Pipik, the writer and his "double", represent the device used by Roth to develop this theme, whose solution is not unique. Indeed, the solution lies precisely in the existence of a penetration between the two Jewish souls in all those who, like Philip Roth, are "Jews to the core".