Word: rothe
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That 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...
...three years Roth spent writing The Counterlife have left him satisfied ("I gave it my all") and resigned to the prospect of being misunderstood once again. He expresses hope that Nathan's putative death in the novel will discourage people from reading his fiction as autobiography, but he is not optimistic. "I write about what could have happened," he says, "not what did happen. Why that's so hard to grasp I don't understand. I have once in a while started off just setting down some incident I'd actually gone through and I can hardly get past...
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...
...written, it should be added, with Roth's customary verve, wit and intelligence. It hardly matters that the plot does not flow forward but rather screeches to a number of halts, that each new beginning is a refutation of what has gone before. The individual scenes inspire absolute belief; Roth's art is such that he can make events seem not only plausible but inescapable even while announcing over and over again that none of them occurred...
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...