Reviews for Deception

The average rating for Deception based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2021-01-03 00:00:00 Gangnerau Matthieu warning to the wise: some spoiler-y content ahead... I finished my 2020 reading year with Philip Roth's magnificent debut collection Goodbye, Columbus, and consequently dubbed him a mensch. All the while I had this nefarious, impudent novel on its way to me, and I knew the compliment probably wouldn't apply for long. The book brags that it's "erotically original". Well, I already read his Portnoy's Complaint in which Monsieur Portnoy jerks off in the bathroom while his hysterical mother screams from the other side. Sigh. Dick Lit. A little something told me that I just might want to throw this book at the wall. Mensch, shmensch. But I was intrigued, because I'm... me. It'd been a year or two since Roth had annoyed me. Besides, I really wanted to read a book comprised of conversations taking place pre and post coitus between two lovers who were married to other people. So, I was willing to take the risk. The verdict? It's really a mixed bag. Written in 1990 when Roth was 57, with over a dozen novels under his belt, it's evident he was at a point in his career where he was free to do what he wanted, to experiment a bit. That's what he was doing here. He decided, "I'm gonna write a book with only dialogue, dammit." The novel is pretty much all dialogue, similar to Nicholson Baker's Vox. But very little sex talk, which is unlike Nicholson Baker's Vox. For a book that's being touted as "erotically original", there is precious little eros here. Huh. The conversations vary between one or two lines, to pages and pages of talking. At first we find out the man is a writer. Hm. Then we find out one of his characters is called "Zuckerman". Hmmmm. About two thirds of the way in, our writer man is finally given a name - it's "Philip". Meow. Cat's outta the bag! The conversations are between two people who have been having an affair that spans years. He, as I've already mentioned, is writer-man, "Philip". She, an English woman in her 30s, is particularly unhappy. Her husband has a girlfriend. She feels nothing for him but she's terrified to leave. She struggles with the dishonesty of her affair. He, "Philip", does a lot of listening. Except, of course, when he's talking about his Jewishness and complaining about the way English people treat Jews, how they lower their voices when they say the word "Jew" in the same way that they would if they were saying "shit". Yep, that's Roth! He also spends many a page discussing Israeli politics, which just didn't seem to fit here. I mean, again, I hate to repeat myself or sound shrill, but isn't this supposed to be "erotically original"? There's also chapters that confused me, and I still don't quite get what was going on there. In these chapters some guy is having conversations with a Czech prostitute. Is the guy the same guy from before, "Philip"? Or is this someone else? I don't like feeling confused, so I got annoyed. (I knew I'd get there eventually, Roth!) I didn't understand the Czech prostitute parts, so I started to skim whenever they came along. I wanted to get back to my conflicted lovers! Then, we witness a conversation between "Philip" and his wife, and the whole shebang becomes very meta. She's furious, having read these conversations in his notebook, and is convinced he's been unfaithful. He's bewildered, doesn't she know he writes fiction? This bit of meta actually saved the book for me, because it's HERE that lies the "deception" alluded to in the title. It's not really the deception of adultery. That's old, everyone knows about that. No, it's the deception fiction plays on the reader. Are all these conversations just notes for his next book? Is "Philip" the writer Philip Roth, or is that just a game he is playing? Were we just reading a book in the traditions of fiction that we're used to, or was this all the notebook that his wife stumbled upon in his study? Are the conversations ones that took place in real life or his imagination? Are we, the readers of this novel, turned into a jealous wife? What can the reader ever know? Well, that's original. What the reader can know, thank the good lord, is their own reaction to reading a book. And as for THIS reader, I was at times beguiled, at times bored, at times irritated, and at times quite impressed by this audacious little novel. Pretty standard Roth experience, I'd say. Now, go read Goodbye, Columbus!

Review # 2 was written on 2018-04-24 00:00:00 Lynn Smith "How could you be humiliated by something that isn't so? It is not myself. It is far from myself--it is a play, it's a game, it is an impersonation of myself! Me ventriloquizing myself. Or maybe it's more easily grasped the other way around--everything here is falsified except me. Maybe it's both. But both ways or either way, what it adds up to, honey, is homo ludens!" - Philip Roth, Deception Roth is experimenting with dialogue. Think of this book as the pre- and post- coital conversations between a man and his mistress, interspersed with dialogues with other women and his wife. The narrator is named Philip Roth, just to confuse things (the first time Roth uses his own name and not some stand-in like Portnoy, Kepesh, or Zuckerman) even more. To complicate matters, Roth also throws in a lot of REAL accounts (trips to Czechoslovakia, etc) that most certainly are more true than fiction. He pushes the boundaries of fiction to the point where the snake indeed eats the tail of the snake. I'm just not sure if the head is fiction or the tail. And I'm sure Roth (both the ficitional Roth and the real) would have it no other way.