[In the following review, Levi contends that the conversations, letters, and essays collected in Shop Talk provide insightful glimpses into the careers of important postwar writers, particularly into Roth's motivations and literary inspiration.]

Philip Roth spent much of the '90s writing a series of sharp-edged novels that probed the darker dynamics of American life. Shop Talk arrives not so much as a coda to this project but da capo—a return to the first measures of his writing life, a playing through from the beginning of the obsessions of a 40-year career. The 10 conversations, letters and essays that make up the book not only give fascinating glimpses of some of the deans of postwar literature but also provide a working diagram of the very engine that makes Roth run.

A reader of Roth's 1993 novel, Operation Shylock, who watched the protagonist (the fictional Philip Roth) interview a Holocaust survivor, will not be surprised to learn that a decade before, the writer Philip Roth interviewed Aharon Appelfeld in Israel, Primo Levi in Italy and Ivan Klima in Czechoslovakia, three direct witnesses to the atrocities of World War II. In the case of Appelfeld, Roth's interest is not in the moral puzzle of whether one can write about the Holocaust or the mechanical how. Rather the reader of Shop Talk can watch the writer siphoning another character into his pen.

At 55, Aharon is a small, bespectacled, compact man with a perfectly round face and a perfectly bald head and the playfully thoughtful air of a benign wizard. He'd have no trouble passing for a magician who entertains children at birthday parties by pulling doves out of a hat—it's easier to associate his gently affable and kindly appearance with that job than with the responsibility by which he seems inescapably propelled: responding, in a string of elusively portentous stories, to the disappearance from Europe—while he was outwitting peasants and foraging in the forests—of just about all the continent's Jews, his parents among them.

Conversations with Klima and his comrade, Milan Kundera, also provide Roth with an entree into the Mitteleuropa of writers that he collected in translation as editor of the Penguin series Writers from the Other Europe. Together they discuss the work of Polish writer Bruno Schulz (also drawn out in the 1976 interview with Isaac Bashevis Singer) as well as the work of the multitude of great Czech writers who flourished under Soviet occupation, from current President Vaclav Havel to Josef Skvorecky and Bohumil Hrabal. And, of course—this being Philip Roth—talking with Czechs and talking in Prague means talking of Franz Kafka.

Roth has swum in Kafka ever since he first dived with Brenda Patimkin into the pool at the Green Lane Country Club in his 1959 debut novella, Goodbye, Columbus. For Roth, every man's home is his Castle, and every Roth man is a K.—if maybe a quantum level more sexually voracious. The Czech conversations display Roth as a Kafka-lover who is enamored of Klima's politics and Kundera's eroticism. Is it any wonder, then, that this combination would provoke the 1977 metamorphosis of Roth's Professor of Desire, David Kepesh, not into a giant cockroach but a giant breast and, later, inspire his dream of rooting out the essential Kafka on a trip to Prague through an examination of an 80-year-old woman who claims to have been Kafka's prostitute?

Conversations with Bernard Malamud and Edna O'Brien, letters exchanged with Mary McCarthy and a rumination on his neighbor, painter Philip Guston, lead Shop Talk to a fitting conclusion. In the final piece, Roth rereads the works of an American writer, Saul Bellow, his most immediate precursor, “the ‘other’ I have read from the beginning with the deepest pleasure and admiration,” as he wrote in the dedication to his 1975 collection of essays, Reading Myself and Others.

Bellow, after all, is the Columbus who pointed Roth toward the Promised Land of assimilation, where a Jewish American writer could imagine, as Bellow did, a fictional Augie March, a man who could assert his own bona fides not by conceding, “‘I am a Jew, the son of immigrants’ … but … by flatly decreeing, without apology or hyphenation, ‘I am an American, Chicago born.’” It was the soil of a new Canaan that Roth would till, with a Portnoy who dated shiksa goddesses and a Nathan Zuckerman who did him one better, by returning to his skeptical family in New Jersey with the Jewish girl to silence his mother forever: Anne Frank.

But it is the opening 1986 conversation of the collection with Levi that is the jewel of the collection, perhaps because Levi, who once worked as the manager of a paint factory, responds to the probing of Roth—one of the great craftsmen of American letters—with an understanding of both the analytical and the aesthetic elements of shop talk. “On our way to the section of the laboratory where raw materials are scrutinized before moving to production,” Roth writes as they stroll through Levi's former job site, “I asked Levi if he could identify the chemical aroma faintly permeating the corridor: I thought it smelled like a hospital corridor. Just fractionally he raised his head and exposed his nostrils to the air. With a smile he told me, ‘I understand and can analyze it like a dog.’”

Like a dog, Roth approaches these writers and sniffs, in part to analyze what makes them the stunning and important writers they are. But like a dog, Roth is also capable of reveling in pure enjoyment of the craft of his colleagues, lying down and rolling around in it, showing us who he is and what gives him pleasure, simply because he can.