Sometime in 2011 or 2012, racing in a cab to pick up my kids from school, I passed Philip Roth on the corner of West 79th Street and Central Park West. At the edge of the urban paradise where I ran each morning to keep my sanity — just as I had heard daily swims kept Roth sane at his Connecticut house — there stood my favorite novelist in a long overcoat, his left hand in one pocket, his right hand extended, palm up, leaning forward as he negotiated a lost cause with a beautiful woman.

“Negotiations and love songs are often the same thing,” another almost-Upper West Side neighbor, Paul Simon, once sang. The same could be said of Roth’s 27 novels — all negotiations of life, love, lust and self. He taught me more about all of these things than any writer I’ve ever read.

The only other time I saw him, Roth was speaking in Boston following the publication of his meditation on the death of his father, “Patrimony.” Having lost my own father this year, I’ve returned to Roth’s long goodbye to help me through mine. And as I hack my way toward completing a project far more personal than my previous book — this one a story about death, life, and love that aspires to be like one of Roth’s — I’m trying to determine whether it’s really me in my words, and whether I genuinely have something to say.

Roth’s “My Life as a Man” (1974) is guiding me — both the book itself, which opens with a “puppyish” son sizing up his “striving, hot-headed shoedog” father, and the way its title captures Roth’s entire canon: humor and gravitas channeled through gorgeous prose making sense of the male body and its desires; a man’s fantasies and flaws; and the precocious sensitivities and longings that one can squeeze out of a man’s life and onto a page.

These musings were enriched by Steven J. Zipperstein’s excellent new biography, “Philip Roth: Stung by Life,” published in Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series. I grabbed it at my favorite Manhattan bookshop........

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