The rise and fall of Seymour Levov, a man so regular that even the manic Zuckerman, hero of five Roth novels, is deceived into thinking that life can make sense.

In a Roth novel, it is not unusual for characters to cross from one text to another as though they were crossing a street.

Like every Roth novel in the past five years, Nemesis is told in a narrative voice that sometimes borders on the pallid.

But there are other ways for things to go wrong in America - as they did in the 1930's and as they did in the McCarthy and Vietnam eras apotheosized in other Roth novels.

Leonard Michaels, the novelist, observed that the emergence of a new Roth novel was like hearing that J.D. Salinger was preparing a sequel to "A Catcher in the Rye."

In fact, the last time a Roth novel made it to the big screen was 1972, when Richard Benjamin, as the title character, rather sleazily redefined "Portnoy's Complaint."

Over the next three decades, only one Roth novel, "The Ghost Writer," was dramatized, and then only on television.

To prepare for Zuckerman, Mr. Sinise said he read earlier Roth novels in which the same character is a much younger man.

Indeed, this book boasts one of the most sensitively observed gallery of people to emerge from a Roth novel in years.

As in that Roth novel, the narrator looks back on his career as a writer, recounting both the details of his apprenticeship and his thoughts on the literary vocation.