Cleverest boy in the class

Spoilt may well have been the first adjective applied to me as a boy, and I grew up thinking it was generic. If you were the only son in a Jewish family, spoilt is what you were. Indulged within means, observed at all times, you were raised with a worldview whose centre was yourself. It all fell apart, of course, on exposure to classroom equality and discipline, but it was bliss while it lasted and it did no lasting harm to the unformed selfimage of a future writer.

In Frederic Raphael's case, it has resulted in some 20 novels, successful screenplays and an almost Burgessian profusion of small pieces and scholarly digressions. His translation of Petronius's Satyrica is due for publication later this year.

Raphael considers himself doubly spoilt. In Chicago, where he was born in 1931, and in St Louis and New York, where he grew up, all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds. His British father, a former ballroom dancer, Oxford Blue and man-about-town with a blot on his escutcheon, had gone to America to seek a fresh start and wound up working for Shell, a British company.

His mother, a Kansas beauty, was all a boy could wish for - caring, clever and charming. The only shadows on their contentment were his father's anti-Semitic boss and the imminence of war. Offered a transfer home in 1937, Raphael senior accepted and the family sailed for London, where young Frederic felt himself a total misfit.

This was to be the second spoiling of his childhood: having to adapt to an alien, cold, mean society that envied an American ease which it could never emulate. He was thrust into the cold-bath regime of a fairly typical Home Counties prep school that moved to North Devon when the building was requisitioned for pre D-Day purposes. A seaside hotel made do as a school; it doesn't sound too awful.

But Raphael was acutely aware of his otherness, as an American in England and a Jew (though non-observant) in chapel. This, too, was no bad training. A man on the fringe of society sees its faults and fissures more vividly; I doubt, somehow, that Raphael could have written The Glittering Prizes without this ability to stand off and observe his Cambridge crowd with creativedetachment. His sense of alienation intensified at public school, where he ascribes his discomfort to institutionalised anti-Semitism.

This may not be the whole story. Beaten to a Winchester scholarship by applicants who were demonstrably less clever, he went to Charterhouse, where slights and jibes lurked at every turn.

He was prepared to jeopardise his college career by firing a vitriolic letter at a visiting prelate who had uttered a glib remark about Jews. Raphael set out to confront prejudice wherever he sniffed it. He courted neither popularity nor comradeship. Contemporaries remember him as the cleverest boy they ever knew.

Adulthood dawned on a return trip in 1949 to the United States, where nice girls kissed more avidly than in England and his mother turned unexpectedly envious. As if to end innocence, she broke silence in mid-Atlantic on his father's early indiscretion. Things, Raphael discovered, were not quite what they had seemed. Between two continents, a writer was born.

There is, Raphael reminds us, an important distinction between confession and autobiography. The object of this acute, often beautiful, memoir is not to come clean or to rattle closet skeletons but to recall temps perdu with a Proustian precision, sanitised of sentimentality. He is trying, as he puts it, "to get to the root of the persistent dread which has haunted my life, despite its joys, blessings and petty achievements". Self-dissatisfaction, the mark of the true artist, permeates every page of this fanatically detailed book.