Counterlife [Hardcover]

Philip Roth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1996

This radical work, whose protagonist is the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, ranges from a Christmas Carol service in London's West End to a Sabbath evening celebration in Israel's occupied West Bank. It suceeds in evoking both the nationalist militancy within modern Israel and the coded but palpable manifestations of anti-Semitism in establishment England.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The saga of Henry and Nathan Zuckerman continues, 13 years after novelist Nathan Zuckerman first appeared in Roth's 1974 effort, My Life as a Man. In The Counterlife, the dentist Henry suffers an unsettling--and for Roth, a predictable--side effect to his heart medication: impotence, which leads him to undergo an ill-fated operation. The multi-layered plot line travels from New York to London to Israel, while the characters undergo a series of surprising transformations. In the words of Nathan, a change in one's life causes "a counterlife that is one's own anti-myth." It's vintage Roth. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Library Journal

For the latest installment in his autobiographical series (collected in Zuckerman Bound , LJ 7/85), Roth has written a puzzle, but one with passion and purpose. Its mysteries, more logical than magical, concern whether either Zuckerman brother, Nathan the novelist or Henry the dentist, has suffered impotence from drugs prescribed for a heart condition and has subsequently died during a bypass operation. Each of the book's five chapters, ranging from New York to Israel to London and environs, is contradicted by what follows, until the end reminds us forcefully that The Counterlife is, like any novel, neither true nor false but counterfactual. Along the way, monologues, eulogies, letters, interviews, and conversations ponder Judaism and Zionism, the nature of personality, the competing claims of imagination and life, and (Roth being Roth) sex. Recommended. Hugh M. Crane, Brockton P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: San Val (August 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1417718978
• ISBN-13: 978-1417718979
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,155,535 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six years "for the entire work of the recipient." In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians Award for "the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003--2004." In 2007 Roth received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Roth in transition, August 16, 2005

By 

jonsj (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Counterlife (Paperback)

The Counterlife is one of Roth's most unusual and experimental novels, and finds Roth in transition from the spare, elegant books of the Zuckerman Bound trilogy to the more expansive Zuckerman novels of his recent, acclaimed "America" trilogy (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain).

In The Counterlife we get the full range of Roth--from the moving but wickedly funny first part Basel, where Nathan Zuckerman narrates the events leading to his brother Henry's death and subsequent funeral, to the second section Judea, where Nathan goes to Israel to try to lure Henry (restored to life and now part of a militant Zionist group) back home to the States, to a later section where Nathan has died, and an estranged Henry attends his funeral, to the final sections with Nathan in England, dealing with anti-Semitism and his wife's family in a brilliant bit of social comedy.

Plot sounds confusing, right? Yet The Counterlife is not a wildly post-modern novel, but a fairly straightforward read. Not all parts of the book work as effectively as the others, and the book is less finished than some of Roth's other work, but there are stretches here that contain some of the best writing Roth has ever done. This is a book deeply concerned with questions of identity and free will--more specifically about the many lives we create for ourselves and the way we often form these lives by reacting with or against other people's conceptions of us.

It's a remarkably thought-provoking and absorbing novel; if I would withhold it from the very top tier of Roth's achievements it's only because it lacks the cohesion and concentration of his best work. Still, a deeply rewarding book, and a must-read for Roth fans.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Philip Roth's The Counterlife - A Quest for Identity, November 30, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Counterlife (Paperback)

Philip Roth is one of the most highly acclaimed Jewish-American writers of our time, and The Counterlife confirms his skill as a craftsman and a philosopher on Jewish matters. Roth creates perfect environments for the scrutiny of a subject one frequently encounters in his work: The intellectual secular Jewish male's search for and affirmation of his identity.

This theme is woven into each of the novel's five chapters, which are authored in first-person narrative by the fictional writer Nathan Zuckerman. Zuckerman defines identity by weighing secularity against religious fervor, masculinity against femininity, potency against impotency, and Jewish awareness against anti-Semitism.

While the novel is set in Zuckerman's fictional world, the chapters each tell separate stories. The situations Zuckerman creates vary, and thus three forms of Jewish identity between which he seems to be caught are examined. Zuckerman experiences the identities of the secular son of traditional Jewish parents, of being a militant Jew's brother, and of the son-in-law grappling with his mother-in-law's anti-Semitism which causes the failure of yet another attempt at family life.

Similar themes can be identified in Roth's other works, such as Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy's Complaint. However, the post-modern structure of The Counterlife allows for their juxtaposition within one novel, thereby offering the reader a spectrum of the protagonist's issues of identity.

Roth's prose is explicit, witty, and even funny, making the novel a truely enjoyable and engaging read. In the interest of authenticity, he does not recoil from using obscenities. He mocks Jewish-American militancy and pseudo-religiosity by the creation of Ben-Joseph, the author of the "Five Books of Jimmy," who really misses baseball in Israel and later hijacks an El Al plane for hopeless ends.

Nevertheless, Roth does not lose sight of the danger inherent in this militancy. Zuckerman finds his brother's carrying a gun alarming. He detects a loss of "Henry's [his brother's] Henriness," and wonders whether Henry has "developed, postoperatively, a taste for the ersatz in life".

A well-rounded novel, and certainly a must for those interested in Jewish-American writing.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "An Australia for Jews" - a sad core amidst fine satire, April 4, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Counterlife (Paperback)

This is a funny, satirical literary novel about the clownish mid-life crisis of a typical suburban Jewish New Jersey dentist - yes, it's Roth country! But at it's heart, in the Israel section of the book, the farce suddenly dies away: I found the sad, powerful tale of the character "Shuki" unexpectedly moving: Shuki, one of the original European settlers of Israel, who enthusiastically built Israel and fought in the front line through all the troubles, is now an exhausted, world-weary man. He sees all the talented Jews of the world settling in places like the USA, Canada, Britain and France, whereas forty years of unrelenting war have turned Israel (he says) into "an Australia for Jews," a place where the first rate don't emigrate to anymore, only the most hopeless come now, those without the skills or talent to get them into the First World, who must experience a day to day tension so profound it's like a recreation of the pogroms of Russia. Roth's stunning departure from the farcical aspects of his story and Shuki's blunt assessments hit the reader like a succession of boxer's blows, the reader lulled previously by all the fine satire and good story telling. Luckily, the farce returns quickly, and we're off for more crazy adventures with the suburban New Jersey dentist and his writer brother, but this is a unexpectedly a very powerful book, and though it came out a few years ago it is, of course, especially moving right now in these troubled times.

Don't miss Roth's other novels if you like this one. I also recommend Dawn Powell's *The Golden Spur*, Simon Raven's *Alms For Oblivion* series, Sandor Marai's *Embers*, the poetry of Philip Larkin and Paul Theroux's *Kowloon Tong*. And all of Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen.