Philip Roth's latest complaint

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It's too cold in Connecticut, says Philip Roth, explaining why he is to be found here, in the small, bare apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that functioned for decades as his studio and now - doubled in size by the addition of the next-door unit, but still small - is home. At 77, clear-eyed but slightly hobbling in his gait, the novelist's days as a country gentleman are drawing to a close. Even walking the 50 metres from his studio to his house in the wooded hills became too much, he says. "I hated it."

But there is another reason for his retreat, which comes out later in the course of a pleasant conversation that rambles from the struggles of writing to guilt, disease, fascism, fame and the cataclysms of fate. "All my friends have died," he says.

Roth first fled the city in 1971, when he was 38, seeking to regain the anonymity he had lost with the success of a certain "sexually indiscreet book" - the notorious Portnoy's Complaint, still the best known of the remarkable 31 titles listed at the front of his latest novel, Nemesis. "I went off to the country and in a certain way never returned," he says. But now he has. His friends are dead. "And it's hard to live up there," he adds, his voice trailing off. "There's enough solitude as it is."

The walls are white and largely bare, with one exception, a framed map of Roth's hometown of Newark, N.J., made in 1932, a year before his own birth. "It's held up much better," he says. But Roth denies any nostalgia for the town and the times he returns to again and again in his fiction, and once again in Nemesis. "I don't want to live there," he says, his eyes glittering almost black in frames of grey. "I don't want it back."

The author sinks gratefully into his favourite chair, a classic Eames lounger, the only piece of furniture in his apartment that is anything more than perfunctory, which he likes in part because of a matching ottoman that can double as a surface for stuff. Thus there is one Eames ottoman piled with papers by his knee and another, likewise burdened, sitting off in a nook by itself.

It is Tuesday, and in Stockholm senior functionaries of the Swedish Academy are proofreading their imminent announcement of the 2010 Nobel Prize for literature. But Roth, now a long-time favourite to win, routinely described as the greatest living novelist, is oblivious.

"I don't care," he says.

Not at all?

"I don't care, no. I really don't. I've won enough awards."

He admits he would be a "happy dude" if he won. (In the event, this year's Nobel went to Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru.) But then what? "Go to Sweden, make a speech, come home and get back to work."

The work is incessant, compulsive. Nemesis is the last in a quartet of four short novels, now classified collectively as "Nemeses," that Roth banged out so rapidly as to overtake the one-a-year schedule set by his publisher. He finished it more than a year ago, he explains, and had to reread the novel before venturing to discuss it with journalists. "I've been thinking about other things, you know."

And writing constantly, eight hours a day, mainly sitting at a desk rather than standing full-time at a lectern as he once did, but always going. What he would like, Roth says, is to keep writing one long book till he died.

"That would be nice," he says. "I would love to get a big idea and just keep writing until I left it unfinished. It would just go as long as I was breathing. But I don't seem to be able to find it."

Instead, his late-career creative power is emerging in a staccato burst of urgent, short books.

Readers accustomed to the rich complexity of classic Roth - the psychological depth and swarm of realistic details that give such life to his greatest works - will be struck by the master's turn in Nemesis, by contrast a simplistic moral fable, almost biblical in its unadorned treatment of inescapable catastrophe.

Bucky Cantor is a very good young man, a gifted athlete and hero to all the boys who gather at the playground he is supervising during the summer of 1944 in Rothian Newark, "over in the city's southwestern corner, the Jewish Weequahic section," where the author grew up. An orphan who resolutely overcame his disadvantage, Bucky is engaged to marry the accomplished eldest daughter of a prominent and wise local physician. But polio comes to his idyllic schoolyard, and formerly angelic Bucky begins to curse God as the incurable scourge carries off his charges one by one. He shames himself by following his love to a mountain retreat, but sickens nonetheless. The book ends with Bucky crippled by the combined effects of polio and misplaced guilt, bitterly renouncing the last proffered grace.

Roth allows that Bucky is a kind of just-the-facts, stick-man version of Swede Levov, the preternaturally gifted hero of his 1997 Pulitzer-winning masterwork, American Pastoral, whose charmed life spirals into elaborate disaster during and after the social tumult of the 1960s. Another "maniac of the why" tortured by his own rectitude. "Swede Levov wants to find an explanation, just as Bucky wants to find an explanation for the epidemic," Roth says. "Who caused it? God, that son of a bitch? Or was it me, that son of a bitch? The answer is neither."

As in so many of his novels, Roth leaves the moral judgments to a barely there narrator - one whose name he struggles to recall 14 months after finishing the book. "I don't have a position, frankly," he says, remaining content merely to set up his characters and knock 'em down.

Correction: "Life knocks them down."

God is a "banal explanation" for the moral mysteries he explores, according to Roth. But considered together, his so-called Nemeses read like nothing so much as dread-inducing variations on the Old Testament Book of Job, in which God appears exactly as Bucky Cantor perceives him, "a union not of three persons in one Godhead, as in Christianity, but of two - a sick fuck and an evil genius."

"That's a nice line," Roth says, complimenting himself on hearing it repeated, but it's not his view. "If I believed in God I would believe that," he says, "but I don't believe in God, so the question is moot."

The stories share a single "mental cast," according to Roth. "These four books together have at their centre cataclysms," Roth says. "Men - they're all men - caught in cataclysms and destroyed. Every one of them - destroyed."

Nice.

"I guess that's the way I've begun to see things," he goes on. "It was not my plan when I began. I just wrote one little book. But there are these cataclysms. ..."

Maybe, he concludes, these are "the writings of an old man."

A darker vision? "A sense of what's beyond one's control, a sense of personal impotence in the face of disasters."

As experienced in one's own life? "I've survived my share of disasters - so far."

Roth writes on, novel after novel, immune to the futility he sees looming in the future of the craft - a world without readers. "The novel's not going to disappear," he says. "What's already begun to disappear, and has been disappearing for years, is the readership." He blames the screens. "It began with the movie screen, then the television screen, and the nail in the coffin was the computer screen. There's no competing against that."

He complains about friends who used to read and now "watch a movie every night - crap most of the time." There's no time left for the book, and the book's time is over. "So I think it's going to be pretty bad for our children."

He writes on, no matter what. "I don't worry about how many people read it," he says of his work. "Truly, whether 200 read it or 2,000 read it or 20,000 read it is of no consequence. What's of consequence is, I wrote it. I was able to write it."

Nemesis began as the word "polio" on a list Roth made of things he had lived through but not written about. "Then begins the struggle," he says. "Who's at the centre of it? I don't know. Where's it take place? I don't know. And as I write it, the book begins to explain itself to me. That's what keeps your interest going against the frustration of writing. You're solving problems. On every page you're solving problems."

No other writer has remained so engaged with his times, over so many times, his ongoing chronicle of multiple generations ardently admired by even the youngest of them. But Neither readers nor recognition factor into that all-consuming work. "Of course I liked having a huge audience, when I had one," he says. "The child in one is very excited by that. But the adult writer knows what the job is."

Do the work. Never stop. Let others curse fate or try to save the world - or misinterpret your novels as allegories of present-day politics, or search them for some other social purpose. "I just try to write the book I can, to write as well as I can," Roth says. "That's the social purpose - to write as well as you can."

Along the way he wrote some books that "weren't great," Roth admits, declining to name them. "I feel I'm doing the best I can," he says. "If I die tomorrow, I'd think I'd done the best I can. Worked as hard as I could, delivered the best I could. Whatever the flaws are, they're mine. I can't get rid of them."

A serious writer has no regrets, he says. "You can't. There's so much work to do."