Two Articles on Philip Roth's The Counterlife -- downloaded from Nexis
Copyright 1987 The Times Mirror Company
Los Angeles Times
January 11, 1987, Sunday, Home Edition
HEADLINE: RICHARD EDER: THE COUNTERLIFE BY PHILIP ROTH (FARRAR, STRAUS &
GIROUX: $18.95; 324 PP.)
BYLINE: By RICHARD EDER
Philip Roth has made his fifth run at the insatiable Nathan Zuckerman,
that wrestler with ambition, fame, sex, his writer's identity, his Jewish
identity and his uncontainable urge to have not merely the last word, but
every other word as well.
In "The Ghost Writer," Roth introduced him as a young novelist on the
make, treading upon the nimbus of his revered and resented role model,
Lonoff. He returned him as "Zuckerman Unbound," celebrity author of a
hugely successful book that shocked family and friends and that clearly
suggested Roth and "Portnoy's Complaint."
"The Anatomy Lesson" had Zuckerman crippled with a bad back, ministered
to by a relay of agile women, and still at work punishing self-doubt with
rage and rage with self-doubt. In "The Prague Orgy," Roth sent him briefly
off to Czechoslovakia, as if to see whether he could find release in a
world where authorial paranoia is dignified by genuine enemies.
And now: "The Counterlife." Like a machine turning faster and faster
and hotter and hotter, it flies apart. Through a story that takes place in
Israel and England as well as in the United States, Roth propels Zuckerman
all ways at once.
He kills him off, brings him back, and confuses him with his dentist-
brother, Henry. He tells his story variously as something actually
happening, as possible fictions contrived by Zuckerman, and as versions
supplied by his English wife and by Henry. These versions, in turn, may be
distorted by self-interest, or they may be additional Zuckerman fictions.
There are alternative beginnings and endings, sliding panels, sleight-
of-hand. As always -- but more so -- the protagonist implacably pursues
his arguments and conclusions in opposite and simultaneous directions. No
cake was ever so lavishly consumed and so jealously saved as Zuckerman's.
"The Counterlife" is ingenious, frequently dazzling, and the most
entertaining and inventive overdose that Roth has written since "Portnoy."
It is the Zuckerman book to end all Zuckerman books. But it doesn't.
After enough transformations to constitute genetic mutation, Zuckerman,
whether dead or alive, is obstinately there: unrelieved, unredeemed and
unchanged. The notion is at least faintly appalling. I am not sure whether
Roth is ready for more, let alone his readers, but his hero -- or
Frankenstein monster? -- clearly is.
Here is a brief account of the book's variations.
The first section tells of the ostensible death of Henry, whose humdrum
domestic life achieved excitement and hope through two clandestine affairs,
the first -- long ended -- with a Swiss woman, the second -- continuing --
with Wendy, his dental assistant. Henry develops angina, and his heart
medicine makes him impotent. Rather than be deprived of Wendy, he insists,
against his doctor's advice, on a bypass operation. It kills him.
The obsessive extremity of Henry's choice seems more typical of his
brother. And it is Zuckerman who tells Henry's story. This should make us
suspicious. And sure enough, in the following section, Zuckerman is in
Israel seeking out Henry. Henry has survived his operation, fallen into a
depression, and -- needing a different kind of extremity -- joined a
fanatic colony of Jewish settlers on the West Bank.
After an inconclusive, and stunningly written, encounter with Henry and
Mordecai, the colonists' charismatic leader, Zuckerman flies to London to
join his pregnant English wife, Maria. There is an attempted hijacking in
which the protagonist, mistaken for an accomplice, is beaten by Israeli
security men, one of whom, naturally, quotes Melville and T. S. Eliot. And
before Zuckerman can reach London, the narration is turned upside down
once more, and Henry takes over.
Now, it seems, it was Zuckerman who was impotent and who submitted to
the fatal bypass operation in order to have sex with Maria. Fresh from his
brother's funeral, Henry visits his apartment, finds the note and
manuscripts of what we have read, and destroys part of them as libelous
inventions. Right after this, Maria appears and is interviewed by
Zuckerman's ghost about her reaction to the book's final section, which
follows.
In this last section, entitled "Christendom," Zuckerman is alive and
potent. He reaches London, joins Maria and goes through a series of
painful encounters with her relatives. They are country gentry whose
politely concealed, and probably vestigial, anti-Semitism Zuckerman
ferrets out and amplifies into a major and possibly terminal quarrel with
Maria.
I say "possibly," because readers are free to decide what
"Christendom's" ambiguous ending means. They are also free to decide
whether it is, in fact, a fictional manuscript surviving Zuckerman's real
death or whether it is the death that is fictional and "Christendom" that
is real. Or neither.
So much for the form: Rashomon-like variations on an event, except that
instead of different versions by different witnesses, we have different
versions by the same witness. That is not quite it, either: Here, the
witness is the storyteller, who inserts himself into and withdraws himself
from the actions of his personages. The storyteller in this case being
Zuckerman. I will get to Roth at the end, since "The Counterlife" -- much
more thoroughly than its predecessors -- is above all a novel about the
meaning of authorship.
On the way there, though, it is a number of other things too; things
that conflict, I think, with the book's larger intentions.
In fact -- and you may ask: With such criticism, who needs praise?
-- Roth is so good in his particular themes and set-pieces that we may
object to their being used as tiles in his more abstract and capricious
now-you-see-it-now-you-don't mosaic.
The first section's grim and witty account of a man giving up his life
for the sake of a sexual obsession is a dark masterpiece. Henry's sexual
connection is so frigid in spirit as virtually to suggest excretion. Yet
despite its frequent absurdity, Roth makes the spectacle of a man fighting
against old age and terminal suburbia convincing -- at least, symbolically
-- as well as comic.
The Israel section, to my mind, may be the best bit of sustained writing
Roth has done. The paradoxes and conflicts of that paradoxical and
conflicted country have not waited for Roth to discover them, but they seem
made for him. In his portrait of a humane and disillusioned Zionist -- a
journalist who once worked for Ben Gurion and is sensitive to the moral
dimensions of the fight against the Arabs -- the author has perfect pitch.
The same precision goes into the magnetic and militant Mordecai, who wants
to settle a Greater Israel by force and faith.
Still better, Roth has rung all the possible changes on the arguments --
often internal, often inside the same person -- among Diaspora,
assimilationist, hawk-Israeli and dove-Israeli versions of Jewish destiny.
He gives everyone a lively and unanswerable truth.
Arguing with Henry and Mordecai -- whose abstract extremism shows how
close they are to the Palestinians they are fighting -- Zuckerman is
wondrously, blessedly at a loss for words. At that point, he is a troubled
assimilationist. Later, in England, he will be -- or seem to be --
something else.
With Maria, Roth is on more difficult ground. She is not only Wasp but
English, with qualities of reserve and of elusiveness that Zuckerman can
mistake for obtuseness, superficiality or lack of passion. Unlike him, she
does not believe that everything that is felt should be expressed. Their
struggle takes place over his contention that the traces of anti-Semitism
he finds in her family and in English society mean that he must henceforth
identify himself wholly as a Jew and that she must accept that as the
primary axis of their relationship.
Maria seems unsubstantial at first. She grows splendidly real in arguing
with Zuckerman, in pointing out his own intolerance. Why, she asks, is it
unacceptable for their child, still unborn, to be baptized, but essential
that, if a boy, he be circumcised? Isn't a mixed marriage mixed?
It is one of Roth's many shining acts of intelligence to have Maria
reflect, later, that in meeting Zuckerman's arguments so powerfully, she
has, in fact, become his creature. It is not in her character to press a
point home with such force; it is in Zuckerman's character.
But the latter's power is also his dreadful limitation. In his sense of
beleaguerment as writer and Jew, he does not merely decree that whoever is
not with him should be against him. His requirement states: "Whoever is not
me is against me."
This is the link between Zuckerman's unappeased nature and his writer's
nature. Roth uses him to explore and expound a particular concept of
authorship, and it is a desolate one.
Zuckerman the author is not merely God with his Creation. He is God so
threatened by his Creation that, having made it, he will not allow it to
exist. He will never fall into Cervantes' trap of creating a Don Quixote
that will eclipse him, or Shakespeare's of creating a Lear, a Cleopatra, a
Falstaff that will live after he dies.
Maria, Henry, Mordecai and even Zuckerman himself -- as character --
have a reality that powerfully entices us. And as we reach to grasp it,
Zuckerman -- the author -- yanks it away. They are real, they are not real,
they are alive, they are dead: Never mind.
For all his advantage, an author expends his omnipotence and defines and
limits himself in some fashion by what he writes. Zuckerman, at the end of
this series of splendid illusions, refuses to relinquish his characters
into life. He reabsorbs them, and there he is on stage, ready for more.
And Roth? Is he ready for more? He takes pains to declare, through
Maria, that only bad critics will confuse protagonist with the author.
As a partly bad critic, then, let me suggest that the identification is
partly inevitable and, as a whole, would be foolish. Roth is perfectly free
to go on to write a detective story or a musical comedy. But so, for that
matter, is Zuckerman.
There is no help for it. The suspicion will always arise that Roth is
Zuckerman's own ghost writer. Meanwhile, an author -- call him Zuckerman or
Zuckerman/Roth -- who does not release his characters is bound to be
identified with them.
"Our revels now are ended," Prospero declares, stepping away from his
creation. He binds himself by its rules. Zuckerman does not. I'm not sure
about Roth.
The Washington Post
January 6, 1987, Tuesday, Final Edition
HEADLINE: Roth's Zuckerman Redux;
For 'The Counterlife,' Leading His Altered Ego Through Life, Death and
Renewal
BYLINE: Paula Span, Washington Post Staff Writer
DATELINE: NEW YORK
Uh oh. Five minutes into the interview and Philip Roth is already
annoyed, sitting very straight in his hotel suite chair and growing tense
around the mouth. "Where to begin to answer that question," he says coolly.
From beneath the emphatic brows fly signals of impatience and reproach.
At issue is his latest novel, "The Counterlife." A couple of years ago,
Roth had been saying that he had completed his multivolumed chronicling of
that notorious man of letters, Nathan Zuckerman. "He's finished, in more
ways than one," Roth himself had written of Zuckerman in a short squib in
The New York Times Book Review in 1983. In 1985 the compleat Zuckerman
works -- "The Ghost Writer," "Zuckerman Unbound," "The Anatomy Lesson" and
the capstone novella, "The Prague Orgy" -- were sandwiched between covers
as "Zuckerman Bound," and that, presumedly, was that.
But no. "The Counterlife" presents the further adventures of Nathan the
writer and his brother Henry the dentist, with a cameo appearance by Cousin
Essie. Why did Roth decide to go back to Zuckerman after all? It must be
the phrase "go back" that's tightening his mouth.
"The book on the face of it is vastly different," Roth says, carefully
composing his response. "The narrative approach is vastly different. Brand
new for me. Unlike anything I've done before. I wonder if it's like
anything that's been done before. I don't know a book it resembles, do
you? For me, it's a new kind of novel."
He was a literature professor for more than 20 years, and he looks and
sounds donnish now in his oxford shirt and tweed jacket. He keeps his voice
controlled, his gestures small. "It seemed to me that if you have an arrow
moving through the air at great speed, you shouldn't throw a wall up to
deflect it, but let it keep going. Zuckerman is my arrow. I thought it
could go deeper and further."
Roth moves down the list of reasons it would be witless to see "The
Counterlife" as a continuation. "Zuckerman Bound" was "about the impact of
vocation," following a writer from his first stories through an outrageous
bestseller and its punishing aftermath. "The Counterlife," by contrast, "is
about the impact of place," as an older and soberer Zuckerman ventures to
Israel and to England.
"The ultimate reason," Roth concludes, "is because I'm interested in it.
They can either come along or not, the readers. They want to, fine. If not
..." He shrugs.
He is 53. His first stories were published 30 years ago; this is book
No. 17 (13 novels, four collections; he sometimes forgets exactly how many
he has written). He is not interested in justifying himself.
"I take my example from Marcel Proust," Roth declares, careful to add
that he's not comparing his achievement to "Remembrance of Things Past."
"People knew a bit about Swann after Volumes 1 and 2. There's distinguished
precedent for this."
There will no doubt be considerable discussion, among the sizable
community of readers and critics for whom a new Roth is an event, about
"The Counterlife" and how different it is, or isn't.
The book regularly and delightedly pulls the rug out from beneath the
reader. Zuckerman's always-dutiful brother Henry has died (during the risky
surgery for which he opted to cure the impotence resulting from heart
disease); the family gathers for his funeral. No, wait, Henry is alive and
well and living a fanatically Zionist life on the West Bank, where Nathan's
gone to see him. Only the plane gets hijacked -- or does it? No, hold on,
it's Nathan who's died in surgery to cure his impotence (so that he can
father a child with his most recent shiksa, the upper-crust Brit); friends
have convened to hear the eulogy Nathan himself wrote. No, no, that's not
it either.
"You think, 'What? Wait a minute, what's cooking here?' " Roth says with
relish. "I want the reader to say, 'What's cooking?' There should be a
certain dizziness in the reader from time to time ... It rather echoes our
experience in life."
He has not performed such blatant sleight of hand before. "The book is
about fictions that are competing for the status of truth," he expounds.
"It's not unusual; ordinary people are constantly inventing fictional
personalities ... We try stories on for size, don't we?" A professor's
device, seeking his students' assent as the lecture unfolds. "Everyone's
his own Zuckerman. Everyone's his own Zuckerman -- comma -- like it or not.
Everybody's his own narrator." And if the narratives overlap, collide,
contradict each other, "that's what engaged me about the writing of this
book."
Still, "The Counterlife" reexamines and reembroiders themes that predate
Zuckerman, that propelled "Portnoy's Complaint" (the 1969 blockbuster that
left Roth permanently wealthy and controversial) and that arose in some of
his earliest stories. Freedom (sexual, cultural, et al.) versus constraint.
Jewishness, varieties and consequences of. Families, their power and pain.
The impact of all of the above on the writer. The writer, price paid by.
Why has Roth gone back -- there's that phrase again -- to this
territory, and with the same guide?
"I think it's pretty clear to both of us that it's not going back," Roth
returns, irritably. He's not writing the Same Thing; if he were "I'd slit
my throat. Anyone who thinks this doesn't know how to read ... A subtle
book requires subtle readers." Crude readers, he says, he cannot concern
himself with.
Among the unsubtle, apparently, were quite a few critics who, despite
their admiration for Roth's work, had begun by the mid-'80s to think it was
time to move on from Zuckerman. Is Roth braced for reaction to ...
"Who? What are their names?" the author interjects. "Whom am I supposed
to take seriously?"
He's getting even more annoyed. Questions of why he writes about what he
writes about strike him as attacks for not writing about something else.
The only thing worse would be for an interviewer to commit the
biographical fallacy, to ask Roth how much Zuckerman's life parallels his
own. No one who's read previous Roth interviews would dare raise the
question; it makes him feverish. He's written whole chapters pointing out
how fiction is not biography (usually it's Zuckerman pointing out how his
controversial blockbuster wasn't autobiographical).
But, Roth now demonstrates, not asking that question doesn't mean not
getting that answer.
"Everything in it happened to me!" he says, glowering but still not
raising his voice. "I died and came back to life. My brother -- who isn't
a dentist -- is a dentist. I am married to an upper-class, aristocratic
Englishwoman whose family is deeply anti-Semitic. My funeral was attended
by all my close friends; I wrote the eulogy, it's all true.
"I take it my ashes were scattered somewhere," he winds up. "I don't
know where. You're asking me to take seriously cliches."
Oh dear. Perhaps it would be best to return to a discussion of the
narrative structure of "The Counterlife," which Roth considers his bold
departure. "In this book, you're in a scientific lab; we're running some
experiments," he says, more agreeably. "If Henry dies, what follows? If
Henry lives, what follows? A series of if-then propositions. Now I know
I've done that 15 times in 15 other books" -- arched eyebrow -- "but I
forget."
He compares his contradictory chapters to dreams, "profoundly realistic,
detailed, densely naturalistic dreams." And indeed, reading "The
Counterlife" is a little like learning that Pam Ewing dreamed the entire
last season of "Dallas."
Roth looks uncertain at this. He spends most of each year sequestered in
rural Connecticut, part of it in London, some months traveling -- and
little time keeping up with pop culture (except for the Mets).
"Oh, I see," he nods when the TV allusion is explained. "But I'd go a
step further and say that all these dreams are true."
He has uncoiled a little, allowing his shoulders to sink back into the
chair. "You and I," he says, "are now talking about things I care about."
Well, one can hardly blame the man for his wariness; it's hard to think
of a major figure in American literature who commands such attention and
respect and at the same time has been under such continuous bombardment.
Even the new structure of "The Counterlife," in which Roth takes such
pride, is already being subjected to the familiar crossfire. Last Monday,
it was raked by New York Times critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt: "We become
so aware of the narrative's duplicity that all that is left to us is the
burden of the author's self-consciousness as an artist and a Jew." Then,
in Sunday's Times Book Review, novelist William Gass weighed in with a
sustained rave for "Roth's magnificent new novel, a remarkable change of
direction ..."
For close to 30 years now, wide admiration for Roth's writing has
coexisted with vocal disappointment that he refuses to use his evident
gifts for loftier purposes. The muttering waxes and wanes but goes
something like this: He writes like an angel but look what he writes
about. Crazy Jews! Rampant Sex! Himself!
"Philip's been attacked more than other writers," says David Rieff, his
editor at Farrar, Straus. "People want him to do other things than he wants
to do -- critics, especially -- and they're upset when he doesn't behave."
The anger began when he began: His first New Yorker story, "Defender of
the Faith," published when he was 24, brought bitter complaints. Roth stood
accused of fueling the fires of anti-Semitism, sometimes of being a "self-
hating Jew" himself. That bill of particulars was read regularly for a good
15 years, the outrage intensifying with "Portnoy's Complaint," an oh-yeah-
take-that sort of novel. Roth's talent, critic Irving Howe wrote in a long,
infamous "reconsideration" in Commentary, "is real enough, but it has been
put to the service of a creative vision deeply marred by vulgarity."
Some feminist critics also took shots at Roth, though less steadily. He
remembers his picture appearing (along with Mailer's, Miller's and
Bellow's) on the front page of the Village Voice in the late '70s under the
headline, "Why Do These Men Hate Women?" Just last month, Roth's old friend
William Styron sent him a clipping -- "totally for laughs," Styron says. It
was "a long attack by a feminist -- on me -- which was in a French literary
magazine. It mentions Philip and his work quite a few times. Totally
negative about both of us, a half-wild, crazy sort of piece. I thought he
might appreciate it."
Later, among the high praise that flowed with each subsequent novel, the
muttering began to focus on Roth's supposed self-obsession as he wrote
three, then four, now five books about a tormented author. "The line about
Philip's work," says Rieff, "is, 'Here's this incredibly talented writer
who unfortunately has only himself to write about, when there's a whole big
world out there.' I happen to think that's utter rubbish," he adds,
imagining how it would sound if journalists cornered Samuel Beckett and
asked if he weren't ever going to write about anything except death. "Why
people want [Roth] to be this combination of Anthony Trollope and Shecky
Greene, I can't imagine."
Roth's many partisans see the altercations and polemics as a tribute to
his power as a writer. But the anger and thwarted expectations he foments
also seem to be at work in denying Roth major literary awards. He has not
received the National Book Award since "Goodbye, Columbus" won in 1959, and
has never won the Pulitzer, though he made the jurors' "short list" for
"The Ghost Writer."
For years, Roth argued back. After "Goodbye, Columbus," he could be
found at the University of Iowa Hillel House, at the Jewish Community
Center in Hartford, at Yeshiva University, explaining, defending, setting
the record straight. Attacked in Commentary, he responded with a scholarly
discussion in The New York Review of Books about Jews writing on Jews.
Though he never took the attacks seriously enough to start writing the
books his critics wanted him to write, he was troubled by Howe's strafing,
friends knew, and disappointed to lose the Pulitzer.
Yet at some point, Roth evidently decided to leave the ring. Now, asked
to respond to this contention or that, he bristles and declines. "You're
putting me in the position of defending myself against accusations made by
fools," he'll say. "I really can't do it. I've been around too long." When
he feels the need to return fire, he does it in his novels -- as in "The
Anatomy Lesson," where a Percodan-popping Zuckerman takes revenge on a
Howe-like critic. (Zuckerman masquerades as a porn publisher, assuming the
troublesome critic's name.)
Styron applauds. He and Roth have in common a long history of feeling
maligned by critics. "I think he's quite right," Styron says. "He has
departed from that course [of defending himself] and it's all for the best
... Most writers have a tendency to want to justify and explain,
particularly when [they] feel [criticism is] unfair. But finally, what one
does is to give up that tangent and let the work speak for itself."
At Farrar, Straus, "The Counterlife" is expected to speak for itself
rather forcefully. Editor in chief Roger Straus ordered a bigger first
printing (75,000 copies) and higher promotion budget ($ 75,000 to $ 80,000)
than any of the Roth novels published over the past decade have had. "I
suspect," Straus says, "that this one will be appreciated."
From London, shortly before "The Counterlife" hits the stores, Roth
agrees to chat a bit more. He and actress Claire Bloom, who after 11 years
has earned the journalistic label Longtime Companion, spend most of the
winter there. "In January and February, Connecticut is like Iceland," Roth
observes. Now, Zuckerman has gone to live in England as well.
He -- Zuckerman -- goes first to Israel, a place that's rarely figured
in Roth's fiction (though Alex Portnoy spent a few pages there, years ago).
It was a place, Straus and Rieff both knew, that Roth wanted to take on.
"There are so many reasons," Roth begins. "I haven't been uninterested
in Jews, and they've got a lot of 'em there. Also, it's a terrific
international hot spot and trouble spot, sort of begging to become a part
of my novel."
As for England -- where Roth may raise a few hackles with his depiction
of the anti-Semitism he glimpses beneath the lovely manners -- "I've gotten
to know it very well. One mustn't forget that everything a writer gets to
know well is money in the imagination bank. You'd be a damned fool not to
exploit what you know well. Law of Life: Writers write most profoundly
about what they know most profoundly."
Roth's writing continues, as it always does. He's known for his
discipline, for sitting down at the typewriter daily and being unavailable
for hours to visitors, phone callers, external distractions of any sort.
Between bouts at the keyboard he's always observing, remembering, sometimes
taking notes, sometimes "letting it wallow around, inside the mess ... My
mind is working in a writerly way all the time."
He is uncertain whether the pages he's begun to accumulate constitute
the next book or not. And it seems pointless, not to say risky, to ask
whether Nathan Zuckerman figures in them.
Zuckerman. Does he feel any affection for Zuckerman after all this time?
He has lived with Zuckerman for about as many years as he has lived with
Bloom.
"Affection for him," Roth muses, long-distance. "No, he neither pleases
me nor displeases me. He's an instrument. I feel extremely exploitive of
Zuckerman."
But does his creator root for him?
"Not as much," says Roth, "as I root for myself."