Word: nathaneal
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Others see less calculation behind Peking's moves. "The Deng style of decision making is very easygoing," says Andrew Nathan, a China expert at Columbia University. "To use a metaphor from pool, he takes a shot at the setup and sees where the balls go." Peking may have quieted the restive students for a while. But it is probably only a matter of time before, once again, the dragon of democracy pokes its head through Deng's window...
...last touch may strike some as overdoing it. But going too far has been a hallmark of Roth's fiction from the beginning. His early stories provoked some Jewish readers to condemn him for anti-Semitism; Portnoy gave him a reputation as a sex maniac. His three books about Nathan Zuckerman, The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981) and The Anatomy Lesson (1983), have led to charges that Roth is trapped in narcissistic reverie, writing about a writer who resembles himself. As if thumbing his nose at such comments, the author now offers The Counterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 324 pages...
There are other things in this novel that Roth's detractors will probably dislike. Nathan, a self-conscious fellow, does not allow the reader to forget that the words on the page are made up, inventions: "Being Zuckerman is one long performance and the very opposite of what is thought of as being oneself." So much for sincere, straight-from-the-shoulder storytelling. People who want to know what really happens in a work of fiction, a peculiar but widespread desire, are going to find themselves bewildered. Only one incontestable fact can be gleaned from the book: The Counterlife...
...ripple out from a central conceit. A man with a heart condition finds that the medication he must take renders him impotent. Hence Henry Zuckerman, 39, faces the bleak prospect of life without any more after-work office trysts with his alluring assistant. Similarly, Henry's famous older brother Nathan, 45, cannot marry an Englishwoman named Maria and create both the child and the settled life that, after three failed marriages, he now desperately wants. The only solution in both cases is bypass surgery. The Zuckerman brothers face the same difficult choice, but for diametrically opposed reasons. Henry, the responsible...
...never emerge. Life is unfair, and fiction can be even worse. But what transpires in a novel need not be irreversible. So Henry may survive instead and go to Israel, where he joins a settlement on the West Bank and tries to find, or lose, himself in Jewish history. Nathan may come out of the operating room a new man, get married and move to England with his lovely and reassuringly pregnant wife. Other variations surface. Perhaps Nathan alone dies, and Henry, going through his late brother's effects, comes upon the manuscript of a book that has chapters with...