Customer Reviews

The Counterlife

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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.

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.

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.

The Counterlife is a splendidly written and multi-layered book, one that forces the reader to refocus its reading as the book expands its meaning in deeper and larger territories. First, the book appears as a witty and often cruel description of middle-class life in American suburbia. Then, one of the book's main centers (there are several) takes center stage: what is it to be a Jew in today's world, between Israel and America? Sex, of course, and more specifically, what's at stake in sexual relationships, is also one of Roth's topic (as it has always been). Finally, as the book unfolds, we understand its key concern: the definition of one's identity, through the fictions told by oneself and refracted by others (the book has three narrators: the author, and the two Zuckerman brothers). Then, all the book's plural themes: fiction writing, men/women relationships, Eros and Thanatos, Jewishness and anti-Semitism, get blended into a reflection about the loss of innocence, the exile from the pastoral, and the inescapable mirror games of fiction that define/defy personal identity.

This is the best novel I have read by Philip Roth (so far). It is unlike anything I have read by him before, or by many others, for that matter. When I finished it, I was reminded of a number of musical compositions called "Variations On a Theme By xxxxx), in which a composer takes a theme by another composer and then composes several variations on that theme. Here, however, the original theme is by Roth himself, so that Roth is writing variations on his own theme.

I don't like people who write reviews with spoilers, so I won't do that here, in that I won't reveal any crucial plot elements. However, I don't believe it would ruin any prospective reader's enjoyment to reveal the book's basic structure. The book is divided into 5 sections. In the first, a major event occurs to one of the characters. In the second, the tape is rewound and that same character's life takes another course. In the third and, in my opinion, the most expendable part of the book, which follows directly from the second section, an unsettling event happens to one of the other main characters. In the fourth, the tape is rewound once again and the same thing that happened to one of the characters in the first section happens to one of the other characters. The fifth section follows directly from the second without the events in the third section having happened. Moreover, in this section one of the characters becomes aware that she is a character in a novel and begins talking back to the author.

Confused? I wouldn't blame you if you were. However, the book does come together with remarkable coherence at the end because it deals with several universal human themes. I think all human beings have "what ifs?" in their lives. Haven't all of us wondered at time what our lives would have been like if such and such hadn't happened. Roth shows us several different scenarios as to how things might have turned out for his characters. Another major theme is Jewish identity: how does a Jew fit into a society where he is a minority and perhaps an outsider? Or, does he reject that society and go to Israel, where Jews run the show? How does a gentile who is in no way anti-Semitic manage a relationship with a Jew she loves but who is also full of anger at the history of anti-Semitism? Finally, what is real and what isn't? What is the difference between fiction and reality? This is not an original theme, to be sure, but rather handles it with exceptional skill and finesse.

Finally, I must comment on Roth's prose style. Roth writes the clearest and most lucid prose of any modern American writer, with the possible exception of John Updike. Reading Roth is nearly effortless. What may be difficult and may cause the reader to pause are the ideas he discusses, but never the prose style. I cannot recommend this book highly enough as a riveting and talented read.

Entertaining, thought-provoking, technically brilliant, and timely. Timely too in its relationship to another much-lauded book, Howard Jacobson's THE FINKLER QUESTION, the most recent Man Booker winner. By coincidence, a friend gave me her copy of the Roth on the same day that I bought the Jacobson; neither of us connected the two. But now, having enjoyed both books immensely, I am amazed at how closely Roth anticipates Jacobson 34 years earlier. Both authors treat the same subjects (male libido and Jewish identity, though not necessarily in that order), in the same context (Roth's book is set partly in England, Jacobson's entirely so), and with the same sardonic humor (except that Jacobson would spell it "humour"). As far as contemporary events go, the three-and-a-half-decade time gap seems as nothing: Roth alludes to Western condemnation of Israel's actions in the Yom Kippur War; Jacobson's characters agonize similarly over Gaza. Both writers invade the no-man's land between antisemitism and paranoia; Roth is the more neurotic of the two, but he has more bite to his satire, and is to my mind the greater author.

Roth has had two abiding subjects in his oeuvre: Judaism and sex. THE COUNTERLIFE explores both, though from an oblique perspective, in that his characters are neither committed Jews nor always sexually potent. The book opens with Henry Zuckerman, a successful Newark dentist, not yet forty, suffering from impotence caused as the side-effect of his heart medication; sex is what he used to enjoy (with both a mistress and a wife) but can now no longer have. He takes the extreme step of having a risky bypass operation, in order to make a radical change in his life. In the next section, Roth offers a different outcome to Henry's story, in which he abandons his comfortable American secularism and moves to Israel as a fervent Zionist, living in a militant West Bank settlement and studying Hebrew and Torah. In each of these scenarios, Henry is visited by his elder brother, the successful novelist Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in several other Roth novels and is clearly the author's alter ego. Roth (or Nathan) has several other variants in store, but each involves an attempt at radical life change, moving into the heart of an issue from its fringes. He calls it "the construction of a counterlife that is one's own antimyth [...] a species of fabulous utopianism," thus explaining the book's title.

Writing through an alter ego who is one of the characters in the book enables the author to play narrative tricks that used to be called Pirandellian but are now labeled post-modern. One, as I mentioned, is the ability to change the story at will. The five sections of the book -- labeled respectively Basel, Judea, Aloft, Gloucestershire, and Christendom, although these are not in every case their settings -- contradict one another in several significant ways, as though emphasizing the author's ability to manipulate a story at will. The Gloucestershire section (a skeleton key to the whole) even changes tack three times in eighty pages; it begins with the author writing about his own funeral and ends with a preview of the final Christendom section, discussed by two of the characters who are to appear in it. While more literal readers may find this confusing, I found it remarkably easy to buy into the parameters of each section, as though they for the time were the only realities. The switches not only added intellectual excitement, they also deepened the perspective and the seriousness of the issues being addressed, albeit in Roth's characteristically flippant voice.

While Judaism and sex continue to battle for the spotlight, the sexual aspects will in the end be secondary. It is more a matter of midlife crisis and the eternal question: Is this really all I am? The answer may be sought in adultery or divorce, but conversely by the former playboy settling down and starting a family; both are found in this novel. The common factor is a radical and often rash life change, the Counterlife. What makes the book so much more than soap opera is that Roth also poses the who-am-I question as a matter of ethnic and religious identity: What does it mean to be a secular Jew in a largely assimilated society? Is it the role of Israel to serve as what he calls the American-Jewish Australia, taking misfits attempting to find themselves as a people? His Judea section is brilliant in its portrayal of many different views of that extraordinary society, many of them extreme, few of them compatible, but all in essence true. When Nathan affects to find similar battlegrounds in the dining-rooms of Mayfair and the meadows of Gloucestershire, he exaggerates hugely -- but he speaks strongly to the need of so many of us, Gentile as well as Jewish, to define ourselves in opposition to the world around us, rather than settling for the quiet beauty of the ordinary.

THE COUNTERLIFE begins with a short chapter entitled "Basel". In this, the novelist Nathan Zuckerman imagines the adulterous mindset and experiences of his brother Henry, a successful dentist and father of three, who chooses to undergo risky heart bypass surgery rather than take medication that leaves him impotent. The surgery kills Henry and his wife, who knows of his infidelities, falsely eulogizes her dead husband at his funeral, claiming that Henry underwent surgery to restore their precious physical relationship. In this fine novel, this is the first apparent counterlife that Roth concocts, which he defines, in reference to Israel, as constructing "one's own anti-myth..."

This narrative strategy--develop an alternative story from the apparent facts--produces some fascinating and deep thinking from Roth in THE COUNTERLIFE. For example in "Judea", this novel's second chapter, Henry undergoes the same heart surgery, lives, and then experiences severe depression, which he manages through aliyah to Israel. There Henry, an assimilated American Jew before his surgery, lives in a settlement in the territories, where he becomes a follower of a charismatic and apocalyptic settler, who another character calls a "psychopath alienated profoundly from the country's common sense." In "Judea", Nathan, also an assimilated Jew, travels to Israel to discuss the wisdom of aliyah with his brother. Roth manages the subsequent clash of viewpoints with great subtlety and eloquence, with a diverse selection of Jews contributing depth or background to their discussion. "Judea", in other words, presents the counterlife to "Basel", where horny and unfaithful Henry basically loses his life for oral sex.

Another illustration: In chapter four, "Gloucestershire", it is Nathan who has heart disease, uses Beta-blockers, and is impotent. Nonetheless, he is determined to father a child with Maria, a brilliant and much younger upper-crust Brit. As a result, this Nathan decides to have risky heart surgery, which kills him. Then Henry, a dentist and professional's professional, illicitly enters his deceased brother's apartment, where he is determined to extirpate from his Nathan's notes all references to his single marital indiscretion. This Henry shares some qualities with the Henry in "Basel"--namely, an adulterous past. And he shares qualities with the Henry in "Judea", who is resentful of his renowned brother. But in "Gloucestershire", Henry is positioned to express the fullness of his remorse and his anger. And he offers yet another counterlife, where Roth examines how the novelist's need to enrich life in narrative can engender misunderstanding and rage in others.

In THE COUNTERLIFE, Roth is an author of disputation. Instead of managing the content of his narrative to a few profound truths, he allows each of his characters to make an eloquent and irrefutable argument. This produces a book with both great richness and intense and unresolved disagreement. In the final chapter, "Christendom", this creates problems for Maria and Nathan, who in a counterlife, marry. But this also allows Maria to make comments on Nathan's character that certainly apply to the author Philip Roth. These include:

o "You and I argue, and the twentieth-century history comes looming up, and at its most infernal. I feel pressed on every side, and it takes the stuffing out of me--but for you, it's your métier, really.

o "You actually like to take things hard. You can't weave your stories otherwise."

Of course, I don't mean to convey that THE COUNTERLIFE is only debate and friction. In addition, there is some truly great descriptive writing, which shows Roth can capture the appearance of a character or the feel of a place whenever he wants. Here's Roth describing Lippman, a settler and fanatic: "Because of his injury, Lippman walked as though intending with each step to take wing and fly at your head--then the torso slowly sank into the imperfect leg and he looked like a man who was melting. I thought of a circus tent about to cave in after the center pole was withdrawn. I waited for the thud, but there he was advancing... his face had the sardonic mobility that comes of peering nobly down upon self-deceiving mankind from the high elevation of Hard Truth." His description of the house in Chiswick is also wonderful.

I'm no expert. But near the start of "Christendom", isn't the sly Roth using this talent to channel Jane Austen?

Highly recommended.

In this amazing, provocative novel - with five interconnected chapters of varying fictive purpose - there is scarcely any aspect of Jewish life, whether at the level of individual, family, or broader society, which goes unexamined by renowned writer, Nathan Zuckerman (Roth's alter ego). Having exposed the ridiculousness of his childhood family in his acclaimed, hurtful book, CARNOVSKY, thus, acquiring a reputation as a biting social critic, Nathan, in frank, often acerbic, letters, reminiscences, and long conversations, challenges comforting illusions in many areas and concerns of life, such as marriage, fidelity, potency, religion, Jewish authenticity, discrimination, etc, including the underlying attitudes and beliefs. Ultimately, it is how one is situated in those facets of life, as perceived by self and others, that supplies the basis of one's identity. However, for the characters in this book, identity is not a given; in fact, they suggest the difficulty of establishing an unquestioned, coherent, resilient identity.

Little is sacred to Nathan in his quest to expose life's fictions. In fact, in the first three chapters of the book Nathan examines the supposed obsessions and excesses in Henry's, his younger brother, life. First, Henry is seen agonizing over an operation with life-threatening possibilities to restore potency, though hardly to improve his marriage. Next, Henry abruptly joins an obscure settlement in Israel established by a radical Jewish element, having suddenly decided that his former life was superficial - inauthentic. However, in chapter four, Gloucestershire, it turns out that Nathan is actually the brother who has had bypass surgery. Henry goes through Nathan's papers to discover that his older brother has every intention of misrepresenting him, disparagingly so, as a person with ridiculous identity issues in Nathan's next book. Interestingly enough, those notes appear as the first chapters of this book - fiction within fiction!

Chapter five, Christendom, finds Nathan, having married pleasant, sharp, younger, upper-class Maria, is convinced that his very being is under assault as it turns out that Maria's mother and older sister either harbor or express anti-Semitism. His defensive, non-religious urbanity is thinner than he realized. Maria is not particularly sensitive to Nathan's concerns, finding his reactions to be a failure to accept reality at the risk of jeopardizing their marriage. The doubts and dilemmas of the fictional Henry suddenly do not seem so ridiculous; perhaps one's choices have constraints that come to the surface only at certain stressful times in life.

A curious aspect of the book is the constant criticism that Nathan (Roth) gets from those whose motives or passions he questions. He, as an isolated writer, is accused of failing to grasp unpleasant, harsh, and changing reality, preferring to excoriate those who have to deal with the world as it is presented to them, and holding to a purist, idealistic view of life that is both arrogant and irrelevant. There is little response. Additionally, the author is hardly unaware of the comedic and absurd aspects of man's foibles. How zany can you get: the young religious fanatic who hunts down Nathan at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and pretends to be an outfielder catching a ball against the wall. The phallic-centric Roth is on full display in the interview scene between Henry and his new dental assistant.

Practically every page of this book is pregnant with perceptive comments, descriptions, ideas, etc. Despite weighty matters, the writing is eminently understandable, precise, sarcastic, and, for the most part, keeps the story going. Final answers are in short supply, however. According to Nathan after his last "stupid" argument with Maria,

"Life `is' and: the accidental and the immutable, the elusive and the graspable, the bizarre and the predictable, the actual and the potential, and the multiplying realities, entangled, overlapping, colliding, conjoined - plus the multiplying illusions! ... Is an intelligent human being likely to be much more than a large-scale manufacturer of misunderstanding?"

While there are no hard and fast answers, the book is not without its view. Sex is a powerful instigator in life; decisions based on sex can be ridiculous. More important to the author are the far greater consequences and meaning involved in fanatical religious perspectives, on the one hand, but also in the dehumanizing of those of a different religious experience. In addition, superior, dismissive, know-it-all approaches to one's own life or towards other will invariably come up short. While this book is not without a certain amount of ambiguity and complexity, it is so amazingly intelligent, thought provoking, and entertaining, that it must be read.

This is Zuckerman Book # 5 although the first four are very short. I am reading them in order so I cannot yet put this in context of the 4 Zuckerman novels that follow.

It is divided into 5 sections and each one contradicts, redefines, rewinds or augments the previous. Without reading the book, I'm sure that sounds like a muddled description.

It's very difficult to write a review on this without spoiling aspects of it. The prose is vintage Roth, the plot plays are inventive, surprising and sometimes confusing. There is ultimate coherence but you have to pretty much read the entire novel to get all the connections.

Of course the arrogant, neurotic, sexual, impulsive, famous writer, Nathan Zuckerman is back as are some of his family. The novel very much dwells on being Jewish whether it be in America, England or Israel. He seems to represent all sides of what being Jewish is and what others think of Jews. Ultimately the novel is about what someone wants their life to be, what defines them and how they can change.

Perhaps this review is a bit confusing but the best summary is that Roth is at his inventive, funny and always surprising best in this novel. I defintiely recommend it but the first four Zuckerman installments should be read first.

Roth excells here in narrative reconstruction, in creating characters whose lives are made vivid, and who are then given counterlives, the lives they might have had. In the course of this Roth also explores Israel- Diaspora relations as one of the characters takes off for Israel and there joins a Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria. Roth also explores what will become an obsessional subject for him in most recent years, the subject of illness and aging.

Roth is a writer whose prose moves and is alive. He can hit you unexpectedly with a remark which will make you laugh outloud. I would only suggest that in showing himself so much a master of the art of 'narrative alternatives' he takes from us a bit of the real sympathy we might have from people who having only one life and story, seem to us more real.