Sometime in 2011 or 2012, racing in a cab to pick up my kids from school, I passed Philip Roth on the corner of West 79th Street and Central Park West. At the edge of the urban paradise where I ran each morning to keep my sanity, just as I had heard daily swims kept Roth sane at his Connecticut house, there stood my favorite novelist in a long overcoat, his left hand in one pocket, his right hand extended, palm up, leaning forward as he negotiated a lost cause with a beautiful woman.“