Operation Shylock.

Philip Roth's latest book is about Philip Roth, so what else is new? Only that this time, there are two of him.

The first Philip Roth, the author of Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint, is the narrator of Operation Shylock. The second Philip Roth swims into view when the author learns that there is a man in Jerusalem giving lectures and interviews under his name. Roth I flies to Israel to find out what Roth II's game might be.

Roth II's game is ostensibly political. He presents himself as an apostle of Diasporism, an ideology he devised to avert a second, Middle Eastern Holocaust by persuading Jews of European ancestry to move back to Europe, where he believes they will be safer. Roth the Diasporist argues that the horrors of the first Holocaust gave European anti-Semitism a healthy and perhaps mortal shock; to expunge whatever remains of it, he has also invented Anti-Semites Anonymous, a self-help recovery group with ten AA-like tenets: "1. We admit that we are haters prone to prejudice and powerless to control our hatred. 2. We recognize that it is not Jews who have wronged us but we who hold Jews responsible for our troubles and the world's evils...." The charter member of Anti-Semites Anonymous is the Diasporist's busty Polish-Irish girlfriend. (When she and the author meet, do they - ? What do you think this is, a Palliser novel?)

Though the second Roth insists that Philip Roth is his own real name, he trades on the borrowed celebrity of the author. As other people begin to confuse the two, the author finds himself espousing Diasporism. Palestinian nationalists and Israeli intelligence get into the act, and by the end of the book, the author volunteers to perform a mission for the Mossad.

Philip Roth is incapable of writing a dank sentence, and this book contains many sparklers, always about some permutation of Jewish life and what living it has done to Jews. An Arab intellectual calls Israel "a Jewish Belgium, without even a Brussels to show for it." A Holocaust survivor who paints, badly, wonders if his lack of talent is Hitler's fault. "If it's any comfort to you," the narrator tells him, "Hitler painted worse." "No," says the artist, "I've seen his pictures. Even Hitler painted better than I do." Roth the author remembers the strangeness of going to Hebrew school in New Jersey in 1943. "For one hour a day ... we sat there and learned to write backwards, to write as though the sun rose in the west and the leaves fell in the spring, as though Canada lay to the south, Mexico to the north, and we put our shoes on before our socks."

The book is a mess, though, because the plot device of a second Roth and the introduction of spies and spying allow Roth - the real one - to indulge himself in tiresome games of indeterminacy. This is a technique familiar to veterans of grade-school "literary magazines," whose stories of time- or space-travel contain the line And then I woke up. But then the hero finds in his pocket Abraham Lincoln's nail clippers or a phaser from Alpha Centauri, and asks himself, Was it a dream?

Roth did not begin this way. His first stories and novels were straight-forward looks at Jewish life in America. Long before Operation Shylock, Roth was a Diasporist, who wrote of the American experience in two styles. The first, which produced his early short stories and Goodbye, Columbus, was intricate but smooth, a comely offspring of Henry James. The second, explosive stand-up, first appeared in print in Portnoy's Complaint. With two strings to his bow, Roth seemed poised for who knew what.

Yet the amusing, outrageous things Roth had revealed about Jews in both his voices turned out to be too hard to take. Not for other Jews, of whose hostile reactions Roth makes altogether too much (at one point in Operation Shylock a character grandiosely compares Roth's critics to Spinoza's), but for Roth himself. Later books either revisited the scene of his literary crimes (The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound), or constructed earnest apologies to his parents (Patrimony), or tugged at the cat's cradle of What is real?, as this one does. Behind them all slouches the figure of Roth himself, the nimblest writer in America gone heavy-footed with angst. "Come, someone, anyone," he cries, in the words of Alexander Portnoy, "find me out and condemn me - I did the most terrible thing you can think of: I took what I am not supposed to have!" Or wrote what he was not supposed to write.

Evasiveness not only snarls the story of Operation Shylock, it also undermines the moral, if that's what it is. At various points in the book, characters who seem to be credible argue that Israel is an unjust state which manipulates the dual loyalties of non-Israeli Jews. That makes Pat Buchanan sound like Norman Podhoretz, if it is meant seriously. But in this book, it can't be taken any more seriously than a reflection in a tailor's triple mirror.

Something else is eating Roth in Operation Shylock: the funk of a late-twentieth-century writer watching the news and the docudramas. Roth juggles some big stories here - Leon Klinghoffer's murder, John Demjanjuk's trial, Zionism, the Holocaust - without being able to shake the suspicion that his dexterity is somehow beside the point.

All this writing by non-writers, I thought, all these diaries, memoirs, and notes written clumsily with the most minimal skill, employing one one-thousandth of the resources of a written language, and yet the testimony they bear is no less persuasive for that, is in fact that much more searing precisely because the expressive powers are so blunt and primitive.

It is depressing to see so talented a man succumb to such a confusion of categories. Writing is not ward-heeling, or geopolitics. A writer must believe not only that he writes better than Hitler, but that he is in some sense more important than Hitler. If he doesn't, then let him become a Mossad agent, or a voter. Otherwise, let him write better books than this one, please.