Steven G. Kellman cuts an impressive figure. The University of Texas at San Antonio English professor is the recent winner of a citation for excellence in reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. More impressive still, he is the author of an acclaimed biography of the novelist Henry Roth. And most impressive (of course) he is a contributor to the pages of The Chronicle Review.

Sure -- I suspect you are thinking -- Kellman has much to be proud of, but why the special notoriety? After all, there are at least a few well-regarded biographers stalking the halls of academe. And over the years there have been more than a few celebrated critics who have contributed to The Chronicle Review.

But how many of them, I ask, can claim to be characters in a Philip Roth novel? 

That character, Richard Kliman, appears in Roth's latest book, Exit Ghost. Kliman is portrayed by Roth's long-time protagonist Nathan Zuckerman as a pesky young biographer intent on making his literary mark by dragging down the reputation of Zuckerman's late mentor, E.I. Lonoff. Zuckerman mistrusts Kliman's "vitality and ambition and tenacity and anger."

"Though I am three decades his senior and not at all the physical twin of a figure 'well over two hundred pounds, easily six-three, a large, agile, imposing young man with a lot of dark hair and pale gray eyes,' Kliman's name resembles my own," Kellman writes.

But there is more to the Kellman-Kliman connection than a similar name. The character of Lonoff, according to Kellman, is based on Henry Roth.  His evidence: In 1934, Roth published Call It Sleep, which over the course of decades has assumed the status of a classic. Roth did not publish another novel for 60 years. In Kellman's 2005 biography of Roth, Redemption, he attributes this epic bout of writer's block to Roth's torment at having engaged in an incestual relationship with his sister as a young man.

Kliman, the fictional biographer in Exit Ghost, is similarly out to prove that Lonoff's (Roth) final work was a long-delayed artistic triumph over his lingering shame over an adolescent episode of incest with his half-sister.

(Bonus reading: In 2005, Jennifer Howard explored one professor's claim that even when an author goes silent -- like Ralph Ellison and J.D. Salinger -- they are in fact still producing readable text.)