Volume 34, Number 5 · March 26, 1987
The Wandering Jew
By Josh Rubins
The Counterlife
by Philip Roth
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 324 pp., $18.95
Philip Roth dedicates his fourth full-length novel about Nathan Zuckerman 'To my father at eighty-five,' and those who have been keeping up with Roth's recent fiction will probably suspect that—on this very first page of text—something more than a heartwarming personal note is being sounded. After all, the center-piece of Zuckerman Unbound (1981) was the deathbed curse of Zuckerman senior: a devastating retort to his son's 'artistic license' and 'writer's freedom.' In case the reader (unlike some of Roth's critics) is not inclined toward biographical research, Roth is now telling us that his father isn't dead at all, that the real son is perhaps not so painfully estranged from the real father, that 'Zuckerman' (whatever his usefulness as an alter ego may be) does not necessarily equal 'Roth.' And so begins a cautionary lecture series—How Not To Read Philip Roth—that will form, both implicitly and very explicitly indeed, one layer of this elaborate, impassioned, fitfully commanding new novel.
Review, 2945 words
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