Roth always favored protagonists who were thinly disguised doubles of himself: masturbating Alexander Portnoy, philandering Nathan Zuckerman, a tortured writer named Philip in his 1990 novel Deception. But this went further. Shylock is written in the voice of a writer named Philip Roth, who has authored the exact same books and led the same life as the actual Philip Roth. We’ll call him “Real Roth.” He begins the novel already destabilized, having recently emerged from a mental-health breakdown initiated by the sleeping pill Halcion. It had been so severe that, in a psychotic state, he had asked his wife, “Where’s Philip?”—an early and harrowing reminder that a person’s self can slip away from them without anybody else’s help. While recovering from this trauma, Real Roth discovers that there is a man who calls himself Philip Roth, dresses like Philip Roth, and looks very much like Philip Roth and is getting into all kinds of trouble far away in Jerusalem. We’ll call this character “Fake Roth.”

XREF: Connects to autofiction and the long tradition of authorial self-inscription in literature, from Cervantes to Knausgaard.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 456