I’ve just read it, and for the first time, this largish novella or smallish novel of 36,000 words. To put the conclusion first: a story of small size but great stature. A book of grief, the real thing; by its end, a book of what successful grieving looks like, feels like—it uncovers something sublime. And not the grief borne by the story’s protagonist only, though his is important to his story—most especially that which he bears for the deaths of his beloved parents—but the grieves of those who’ve cared about him: one, at least, of his three wives; anyone who’d empathize with the hurt he has caused each wife, especially the second; the youngest of his three children (daughter of the second wife); his brother, six years older; and especially us—his witnesses. This last portion of grief, ours, we’ve had to earn; he’s been hard to admire. Only late on do we begin to grasp, as he does, his capacity for love and his openness to others, others of every station (including the man who will be his gravedigger—openness “in spades,” we might pun, as I suspect Roth wanted us to). The book has begun with a graveside commemoration of our protagonist’s life, his death having been from cardiac arrest during general anesthesia for an operation, something we learn only at the end of the book. Provoked when he was young by two experiences of nearby death, one quite gruesome, the other of a boy near his age in the next bed within a hospital ward, the fear of it has plagued him ever since. Not so much as to ruin his capacity for work and for sex: quite the contrary. But, of course, aging (he gets to 71) has the last laugh over either. The despair of having to grow old alone, the despair of having been a recidivist philanderer (and serial liar about it); the regret for having squandered the love of his second wife, as well as his artistic gift (the latter he traded for conventional success, or deluded himself about all along—he’s not sure which), the uneasiness that he does not fully repay his daughter’s devotion to him, or understand it: all are together resolved, and I won’t reveal by what means except to say that diamonds and bones are mixed into it via the book’s very, even veritable, title.