Hiding in Plain Sight : DECEPTION <i> by Philip Roth (Simon & Schuster: $18.95; 208 pp.) </i>

If you bring children to a party, it makes sense to set out a game or two so the grown-ups can talk in peace. Sometimes the children’s fun is so infectious that before you know it, the conversation has died and everyone is down on hands and knees playing bears.

Annoyed by the tendency of reviewers to fall into his traps and find authorial resemblances in Nathan Zuckerman--that unquiet, uxorious, witty, domineering, middle-aged Jewish-American writer who starred in previous novels--Philip Roth has been designing hide-and-seek games for them. He, of course, is It.

The games and the adult conversations were powerfully balanced in “The Counterlife,” a set of shifting lenses that refracted a collection of themes dealing with Jewish identity, love, aging and the powers and mysteries of authorship. Now, in “Deception,” Roth has thrown an all-out children’s party.

The game has shifted from hide-and-seek to Alice in Wonderland croquet. Each time you are about to connect with the ball, the flamingo-mallet curves back its neck and regards you in the face. It is fun; it is provocative. It is also provoking. The conversation, it turns out, is too good to be so continually distracted from.

In this case, it is, in fact, a conversation, and told entirely in dialogue. It presents an engaging, ingeniously faceted and very intelligent love affair between a married Englishwoman in her 30s and still one more manifestation of our middle-aged Jewish-American writer. It starts in the climactic time of delighted mutual discovery; it dwindles gently.

First of all, the game, which Roth helpfully entitles “Reality Shift.” Further help is to be had, of course, in the book’s title. Roth treats himself as if he were Poe’s purloined letter; when he hides, he does so in plain view.

So. To begin with, here is a real book written by a real writer named Philip Roth. Roth has lived for years with an English actress named Claire Bloom. If you want to know more about his private life, you must engage a private detective. From reading him, you will learn a lot that is true but nothing that is reliable.

Still, call him Philip Roth and forget about him. He will not appear in “Deception.” On the other hand, we will hear briefly from a narrator, a middle-aged Jewish-American writer who calls himself Philip. Let us call him Philip II. He is quarreling with his wife. Who, she demands, is the Englishwoman he is having an affair with, as set out in a notebook she’s just discovered?

No real woman, he explains, but a kind of imaginative out-take. Philip II has been writing “The Counterlife”--or, let us say, “The Counterlife II”--with its romance between Zuckerman and Maria, an Englishwoman. He, Philip II, has imagined having an affair with Maria. It is as if Thomas Hardy had fantasized an affair with Tess, he explains.

Since he is a writer, he needs to create a fictional character--a Jewish-American novelist in his 50s, of course--to conduct the fantasy. Philip III, in other words. This Philip-by-double-fictional-remove is narrator and protagonist of a series of trysts in the London studio where he is writing a novel. This, we will infer, is none other than “The Counterlife” (III). Indeed, after the trysts end, and the book has appeared, his lover will reproach him in an affectionate transatlantic phone call for having used her as a model for Maria. (II?)

This is quite enough about the book’s Pirandello-like ins and outs. They are more complicated; they are also more fun to read. They are certainly more fun to read than this is to write. I am dangling by two typing fingers in a Roth-trap.

The heart of the book, in any case, is the pillow talk between the lovers, whoever they may be. Philip III--from now on I will call him Philip--speaks with something of a Zuckerman voice. He has the same half-imperious tone, that of an artist revealing and protecting himself at the same time. He has some of the same themes. Once again, we read of the American Jew encountering British snobbery and an occasional vicious burst of anti-Semitism.

The incidents he recounts are cruder, less developed than those related in “Counterlife.” This brings the game back in, ingeniously, for a moment: Here are the rough notes that will be shaped artistically in the finished book.

The Maria-character in “Deception”--let me simply call her Maria--is quite another matter. It is as if, having been rendered with such spirit and charm in “Counterlife,” she continued to grow.

The affair, taking place during several London stays by the writer and extending over several years, marks stages of maturing. Maria is upper-class, writes a little, is at least as intelligent and witty as the narrator, and a lot more winning. She also is unsure of herself.

Married to a charming, powerful and unfaithful husband, she is torn between wanting to find herself and fearing to. In the end--it is a beautifully suggested process; the opposite of Mme. Bovary’s--she will discover something of her own power in the confines of a mediocre marriage.

A questionnaire that Maria and Philip work out in bed suggests the flash and frailty of an affair in its early time of play. “Dreaming About Running Away Together Questionnaire,” they call it. Most of the questions are hers--and how well they are used to portray her! “What’s the first thing that would get on your nerves about me? . . . When you are at your worst what is your worst? . . . You must never get older. Do you think the same about me? Do you think about this at all?”

She has not told her husband about the affair. Despite the narrator’s urging that she make a break, she cannot. She prides herself on not lying, though. What explanation did she give for a bruise on her thigh? Philip asks.

“I told the truth. I always tell the truth. That way you never get caught in a lie. I said: ‘I got this bruise in a torrid embrace with an unemployed writer in a walk-up flat in Notting Hill.’ ”

They play games, including reality-shift games. She pretends to be a would-be biographer of Zuckerman; the Philip plays Zuckerman’s friend. Her voice becomes that of her lover-writer’s: witty, demanding, harsh.

Eventually, her conflicts and the stress of trying to work out her life creep into the pillow talk. It becomes more domestic, sadder, more laconic, more intimate. The game will be brought in again, movingly. Maria senses that she will become material in her lover’s book. In a transport of enthusiasm for her flaring spirit, he tells her that she should be the writer.

“Nope. Never. Couldn’t. Not a bad enough fellow. My scruples,” she says in a bitten-off diction that she imagines is American.

“But maybe you’re not as nice as you look either,” he says, as if to encourage.

“I’m afraid I am. It’s grotesque. I’m English. I’m even nicer.”

In Philip-cum-Zuckerman terms, it is an admission. In larger terms, it is an assertion. She is she, she is unique, she is English; her identity feeds her spirit. Philip/Zuckerman may feel superior even as he loves and admires her. He claims that to be truly human, you have to be Jewish.

But Roth--I have had to bring him in, after all--seems to suggest something more. His Maria-character, more vivid and developed than the Maria in “Counterlife,” may be overshadowed by the self-involving games in “Deception,” but she is heard through them. She is a way out; perhaps for Roth as well. She suggests that there is life after Zuckerman, and no doubt, some one of the Philips will be there too.