The Counterlife Book

An extraordinary tour de force from Roth. Varying styles of narration, sub-text commenting on subtext like Pale Fire, it was an exhilarating read.

There was a lot of quotable material:
Nathan Zuckerman at the Wailing Wall: "Rock is just right, I thought : what on earth could be less responsive. Even the cloud drifting overhead, Shuki's late father's "Jewish cloud," appeared less indifferent to our encompassed and uncertain existence."
And later with his brother Henry near Hebron: "What if that was to be Act Three's awful surprise, the Zuckerman differences ending in blood, as though our family were Agamemmnon's?"
Later, Nathan in the plane from Tel Aviv to London:
"The treacherous imagination is everyone's maker-we are all the invention of each other, everyone a conjuration conjuring up everyone else. We are all each other's authors."

I was debating the merits of Philip Roth with a friend who, like me, idolizes Melville, Proust, Faulkner, Joyce, and Dostoyevsky and I was trying to see if/how Roth could be compared to that sacred group. He can create psychological tension like Melville (the end of the plane ride), he can explore the subconscious and unconscious memory (the various perspectives and particularly the first person narrations with all their perceptive insights), rather than Yoknapatawpha County, Roth's universe revolves around Newark and everyone who Nathan/David/Philip comes in contact with or as I was also thinking, the uncharted geography of Roth's mind. I think he comes up short though because he does not achieve the incredible flexibility of language of Joyce, the promethian power of Faulkner and Dosto's writing, the intimate lucidity of Proust or the epic struggle with nature like Melville. His subjects are vast though: Family, mariage, friendship, memory, pain, loss, discovery, love, israel, diaspora, manhattan, father-son, brother-brother, husband-mistress, husband-wife, husband-brother's mistress, lovers, ex's, cancer, heart problems, depression, angst, parenting, guilt, history, choices and consequences, alternative realities and interpretations. And nearly all of these elements are present in The Counterlife.

Ultimately, history will decide where Roth belongs in the pantheon of epic writers. One thing for sure, The Counterlife was pure, unadulterated reading pleasure.
RIP (1933-2018). One of America's literary giants has left us.