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...FACTS: A NOVELIST'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Philip Roth...
Shortly before the publication of his novel The Counterlife (1987), Philip Roth remarked, "If I ever wrote an autobiography, I'd call it The Counterbook." Fat chance, or so it seemed at the time. For nearly 30 years, Roth had been hearing accusations that he was merely a closet biographer, that his heroes, whether named David Kepesh, Peter Tarnopol, Alexander Portnoy or Nathan Zuckerman, were simply transparent disguises for their self-obsessed creator. Finding that denials did nothing to stem such charges, Roth responded by heaping coals on controversy. Did some readers accuse him of anti-Semitism? Very well. Roth...
Having tirelessly ridiculed the notion that his books are really about himself, Roth has now produced -- an autobiography. It is not called The Counterbook, as it turns out, but The Facts, in which the previously reticent writer points out instances in which his life, after all, has been lugged directly into his fiction. No one who has carefully followed Roth's career could have expected this mid-life striptease, least of all, apparently, its author. His confession begins with an apologia of sorts, a letter to Zuckerman explaining how the book came to be written and wondering "Why should anybody...
This, given Roth's previous intransigence on the subject, is a stunning concession. But before the champagne is uncorked and the balloons go up -- Roth has come clean at last! -- a little caution should be maintained. For one thing, the author essentially blames this book on a period of physical distress and mental depression that he experienced during the spring of 1987: "In order to recover what I had lost, I had to go back to the moment of origin." To an inveterate novelist, apparently, telling the truth is a manifestation of disorienting illness. More troubling, there is that letter...
...Still, Roth's concern that he is the only one who will care about this book seems unwarranted. It is fascinating to watch a major writer re-examine his life, trying to extricate reality from the tales it later inspired. Sometimes, as he has so often pointed out, the gap between the two proves enormous. Roth describes his Newark childhood in warm, elegiac terms that completely invert the cramped, maddening domesticity endured by Alexander Portnoy: "Our lower- middle-class neighborhood of houses and shops -- a few square miles of tree-lined streets at the corner of the city bordering...