The Counterlife: A Novel
By Philip Roth
4/5
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About this ebook
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award
The Counterlife is a novel unlike any that Philip Roth has written before, a book of astonishing 180-degree turns, a book of conflicting perspectives and points of view, and, by far, Roth's most radical work of fiction.
The Counterlife is about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Every major character (and most of the minor ones) is investigating, debating, and arguing the possibility of remaking the future.
Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through all the landscapes, familiar and foreign, where these people are seeking self-transformation, is the mind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the skeptical, enveloping intelligence that calculates the price that's paid in the struggle to change personal fortune and to reshape history.
Yet his is hardly the only voice. This is a novel in which speaking out with force and lucidity appears to be the imperative of every life. There is Henry, the forty-year-old New Jersey dentist, who risks a quintuple bypass operation in order to escape the coronary medication that renders him sexually impotent. There is Maria, the wellborn young Englishwoman, who invites the disdain of her family by marrying the American she knows will be lease acceptable in Gloucestershire. There is Lippmann, the Israeli settlement leader, who contends that "everything is possible for the Jew if only he does not give ground."
The action in The Counterlife ranges from a dentist's office in quiet suburban New Jersey to a genteel dining table in a tradition-bound English village, from a Christmas carol service in London's West End to a Sabbath evening celebration in a tiny desert settlement in Israel's occupied West Bank. Wherever they may find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate.
Philip Roth
PHILIP ROTH (1933–2018) won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in 1997. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004” and the W.H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year, making Roth the first writer in the forty-six-year history of the prize to win it twice. In 2005 Roth became the third living American writer to have his works published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. In 2012 he won Spain’s highest honor, the Prince of Asturias Award, and in 2013 he received France’s highest honor, Commander of the Legion of Honor.
Read more from Philip Roth
Nemesis Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Plot Against America: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Shop Talk: A Writer and His Colleagues and Their Work Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Indignation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sabbath's Theater: A National Book Award Winner Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Humbling Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Dying Animal Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Exit Ghost Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
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Reviews for The Counterlife
224 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is Roth at his absolute best, blurring the line between fiction and non-fiction, while explicitly showing the reader the craft of writing and the choices the author makes. Here, the narrative doesn't follow an entirely linear format; instead it continually resets and passes certain events between characters. Who has the affair, who gets cancer, how might it change the family if a twist of fate turned the other way? Truly one of the best books I've ever read. It's so good that I feel like I should go back through my book ratings and drop the other 5 star books down to 4.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I liked this Roth Novel a great deal. It is a clever twist on the autobiographical novel. The protagonist (really Roth himself) is accused of twisting the facts about the lives of his family and friends in order to write his stories. But here he shows us how he really mixes up fact and fiction to create entirely new characters that are really entirely new. In this novel he even kills himself off to make the point that no ones life is sacred in fiction.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Probably Roth's best book. Funny, perceptive and well-written.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A book like a play, set in five acts, each containing a different mix of the same ingredients: brotherly love/hate, heartfailure, impotency, death, love, what does it mean to be a jew. Often he punctures the thin membrane between the fictious reality of the book - actually several confliction versions- and the real world of the living writer. It's a trick I usually don't like, but Roth pulls it of: the stoy flows naturally between the multiple fictious worlds of the book and reality. Pivotal sentence of the book for me: 'The treacherous imagination is everybody's maker - we are all the invention of each other, everybody a conjuration conjuring up everyone else. We are all each other's authors.' I was emotionally very moved by this book ,especially when Roth writes about the love and hate between the Brothers Henry and Nathan. As for other themes the book is also very concerned with religious extremism and hatred, especially the jewish variant (it contains a quite balanced description of a meir kahane lookalike).
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Roth is at least for me at his ingenious best in this one. The Counterlife starts off with Nathan Zuckerman's brother Henry (a dentist in Tampa) contemplating whether or not to have a heart operation. His medication allows him to live a symptom free existence for the forseeable future--it only has one drawback--it has left him completely impotent and it threatens the secret affair he is having with his dental assistant. From this starting point Roth through his narrator Nathan contemplates and develops through a handful of chapters several different alternative endings--working through in his trademark style the domestic to and fro antagonisms between love and family and sexual attraction outside of family, between nation and race, ideology and cultural and religious heritage bringing in and out of focus first one brother and then the other and interchanging their circumstances so that at first it is Henry who suffers and dies on the operating table, then becomiing an armed militant for a right wing would be Jewish ideologue in occupied territory on the West Bank ready to defend Zionism at any and all cost then only to find later on that Nathan is actually the one suffering the debility--having concocted the selfsame story up to that point using his brother as a foil for his own affairs--only to die as his brother has supposedly done in the first chapters of his manuscript on the same operating table and only to have the suspicious Henry uncover this deception afterwards as he ransacks the recently deceased Nathan's studio apartment. Roth shifts the circumstances back and forth between the brothers and their lovers--maybe not so coherently described here (poor reviewer that I am) however Roth is a fluid writer and a compelling thinker who dots his i's and crosses his t's. He knows how to make things work and work well. He has the ability to look into the minds and aspirations of his characters and make them real. He may be as good a dialogue writer as there is in the English language novel of today. One should not disregard also his very subtle sense of humor. Very highly recommended by the way.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The story is covered from several points of view with alternate realities as interpreted by an author. It really gets to the heart of an artist's interpretation of the world. I found this to be a good but not great novel. It is an interesting concept for a story that gets bogged down in overly pedantic self-analysis. Overall, this is a good but not great book that could have been spectacular.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5An author's anti-Jewish antics come full circle when he feels discriminated against for being Jewish. If Roth embellished on such a plot, I'd have been satisfied. But he instead dwells on a few alternative histories revolving around men suffering mid-life crises. Specifically, how brothers view each other when they undergo operations to recover their masculinity. There's no room for love in The Counterlife, which is jam-packed with vitriol. Against Jews or gentiles, West or East, partners or society. All expressed in eloquent and elongated monologues.I was looking for something more like other Roth's more sensitive works which I thoroughly enjoyed, such as Indignation, Human Stain and Goodbye, Columbus. I marched on hoping for a denouement which strikes a chord. It never came.