BOOKS

By R.Z. Sheppard

PATRIMONY by Philip Roth

Simon & Schuster

238 pages; $19.95

The book on Philip Roth is that he keeps writing the same book. Not quite so. What he writes about may seem constricted, but how he writes is risky and liberating.

Patrimony is an account of how Roth cared for his 86-year-old father during the last stages of the parent's incurable brain tumor. The trick of it is that there are no tricks, just a masterly demonstration of narrative control and emotional clarity.

There are laughs where only Roth can find them: a nutty Auschwitz survivor hustling his pornographic Holocaust novel. But elsewhere, readers may find themselves close to tears. Looking at the magnetic-resonance images of the growth that is killing his father, Roth thinks, "This was the tissue that had manufactured his set of endless worries and sustained for more than eight decades his stubborn self-discipline, the source of everything that had so frustrated me as his adolescent son." And also powered Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint.

Herman Roth was a retired Newark insurance man. Until his illness, he was a vigorous and dapper widower, a catch for the golden girls of West Palm Beach, Fla. He spent part of his winters there. The rest of the year he lived in a modest Elizabeth, N.J., apartment where he washed his own socks and underwear in the bathroom sink rather than use the coin-operated laundry in the basement.

The father's unnecessary frugality annoys the successful son, but it is also % the source of affectionate amusement. "Among the more distressing economies was his refusal to buy his own New York Times," writes Roth. "He worshiped that paper and loved to spend the morning reading it through, but now, instead of buying his own, he waited all day long to have a copy passed on to him by somebody in his building who had been feckless enough to fork over the 35 cents for it."

The disease progresses, and the son becomes parent to the father. "Maybe you want to go in first and do something about your socks. You've got two different colors on. And I don't know if that checked shirt goes with those plaid trousers." Roth and his brother agonize about whether or not to let the doctors remove the tumor, an operation that may prolong their father's life but could also remove whatever it is that made Herman Roth Herman Roth. "Will I be a zombie?" he asks.

No, he will become a Mets fan. Roth rules out surgery and gets the old man interested in baseball. By the end of the 1986 season, he is as enthusiastic as a teenager. When Philip goes to London, Herman burns up the transatlantic phone system keeping his son up to the minute on the play-offs. "Hey," he says, worried about the bill, "I'm giving you this pitch by pitch to London, it's going to cost you a fortune." Roth's grand-slam reply: "But pitch by pitch I was enjoying it enormously, maybe even more than if I had been there. 'Go ahead, Herm. I'm a rich man. Pitch by pitch. Who's up?' "

The Roths, of course. This is a book about what it means to keep swinging. During his father's ordeal, the son undergoes quintuple bypass surgery. His biggest fear is that he will still be invalided when his father dies. But he holds on, and the recovered author is at Herman's bedside, watching as "he fought for every breath with an awesome eruption, a final display, of his lifelong obstinate tenacity."

There is a great distance between Portnoy's Complaint, with its stage-Jewish parents, and Patrimony, the perfect eulogy for a stiff-necked elder of the tribe. Yet in celebrating his father, and by implication the source of his own character, Roth has not strayed from the long path he has cut for himself: to dramatize the adventure of assimilation in all its anxiety, humor and fertile illusions. As a writer and a son, he has now dotted the i's and crossed the t's.