Word: roth
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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DECEPTION by Philip Roth; Simon & Schuster; 208 pages...
...previous book The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography, Philip Roth tried, not for the first time, to settle the confusion about how he transforms his unexciting life as a writer into lively fiction. Deception replays the subject yet again in a novel composed entirely of dialogues. The central conversations are between a New Jersey-born, London-based writer named Philip and a married Englishwoman. The setting is the writer's bedless studio, where the talk is about their love affair, family and work. Nonverbal communications apparently take place on desk, chair or floor...
More tricks. It has been ages since Roth wrote missionary-position fiction. When he did -- Goodbye, Columbus; Letting Go; When She Was Good -- he got into trouble outside his novels. He was accused of being a self-hating Jew, of having had an unnatural relationship with his baseball glove, of betraying friends. The conventional novel proved too damned intimate; Roth's talent for making life fizz up on the page was too convincing for comfort. Since then, he $ has developed a feisty art of self-defense -- and the defense never rests...
...past, Roth does it with the literary equivalent of fun-house mirrors. The Roth-like character in Deception is a distortion of Roth, the man in the book-jacket photo whose intense gaze can penetrate 18 inches of solid Philistine. Readers attempting to nail the real Roth end up with a tinkling of broken images...
Sibling rivalry, as everyone knows, is a whiny bore. Only brave souls would dare contemplate it as a movie subject. Only clever (and compassionate) ones could bring it off as well as have screenwriter Mike Binder, adapting a tale out of his own family's mythology, and director Joe Roth, keeping the retelling simple but not too sweet. True to its original material, Coupe de Ville retains the air of a beloved anecdote polished by many spinnings around a family table...