An American Type

The author of the greatest American immigrant novel, Call It Sleep, returns with this posthumous work. Discovered in a stack of nearly 2,000 unpublished pages by a young New Yorker editor, this is the final novel by Henry Roth whose Call It Sleep was published in 1934 and who ''staged the literary comeback of the century'' (Vanity Fair) with Mercy of a Rude Stream in 1994.

Set in the dire year of 1938, the novel reintroduces us to Roth's alter-ego, Ira Stigman, a 32-year-old novelist, eager to assimilate but psychologically traumatized by the scars of his impoverished immigrant past. Restless with his older lover and literary mentor, the renowned English professor, Edith Welles, whose obsessive love has crippled him, Ira, a ''slum-born Yiddle'', journeys to Yaddo, the famed writer's colony, where he meets a blond, aristocratic pianist, whose inherent nobility and ''calm, Anglo-Saxon radiance'' engages him.

The ensuing romantic crisis, as well as the conflict between his ghetto Jewish roots and the bourgeois comforts of Manhattan, forces Ira to abandon the comforts of his paramour's Greenwich Village apartment. In his relentless search to become a writer, a husband and an American, Ira heads West with an illiterate, boorish Communist, on an illusory quest for the promise of the American West. Thumbing rides from gruff truckers, riding the rails with hobos through the Dust Bowl, Ira explores America's inherent splendors and its Depression tragedies as he returns home, uncertain if he will marry, questioning if he ll ever be able to make anything of his lapidary prose.

Set against crumbling piers and glimmering skyscrapers in Manhattan, against seedy motor courts and tufted palm trees in sun-soaked Los Angeles, An American Type is not only, perhaps, the last first-hand testament of the Depression, but also a universal statement about the constant reinvention of American identity, and, with its lyrical ending, the transcendence of love.