Word: novelizations
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that left Roth deep in debt, thanks to legal expenses, and sent him reeling into five years of psychoanalysis. Awful, but for the sake of the narrative not bad. Right about here a reversal of fortune would do nicely. So our hero wrote Portnoy's Complaint (1969), the novel that made him rich, famous and controversial. Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy were snapped up by Hollywood. And then . . . and then Roth fell in love with a movie star...
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...
Both brothers go under the knife and 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...
Much will be made of the technical virtuosity of The Counterlife, with the result that readers who might love the novel may be driven away. No one but members of creative-writing programs or departments of literature should sit still for another recitative of postmodernism's bag of tricks. The text, you see, is the generator of life, not its transcript; the only real plot that stories convey is the process of their telling. Or, as Nathan writes in a letter to Henry, "We are all the invention of each other, everybody a conjuration conjuring up everyone else...
Indeed it has. But Roth manages to draw blood from stony precepts. His novel is an elaborate verbal gesture; it is also an impassioned portrayal of the moral choices open to living, breathing men and women, a mirror of a familiar world rendered mysterious and magical. The Counterlife is a metaphysical thriller; the quarry is nothing less than the elusive nature of truth...