The Counterlife by Philip Roth

First published: 1986

Type of plot: Metafictional

Time of work: 1978

Locale: New York, New Jersey, Israel, and London

Principal Characters:

• Nathan Zuckerman, a writer of fiction
• Henry Zuckerman, his brother, a dentist
• Carol Zuckerman, Henry’s wife
• Maria, Henry’s former Swiss lover
• Maria Freshfield, Nathan’s English lover and wife

The Novel

The Counterlife continues the saga of Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, who has appeared in a number of the author’s books over a two-decade period. The Counterlife is a highly speculative and highly playful work in the form of a novel in progress about the possibilities and hazards of fiction writing.

Asked why she enjoys Jane Austen’s work so much, one of Roth’s characters, a very proper Englishwoman, replies, “She simply records life truthfully, and what she has to say about life is very profound. She amuses me so much. The characters are so good.” In describing what Austen’s fiction is, Mrs. Freshfield unknowingly also describes what The Counterlife is not, at least not in any way that Mrs. Freshfield could ever understand. As comic as it is complex, The Counterlife consists of five narratives that, while interrelated, are not linearly developed in any conventional sense, are not resolved, either individually or together, and are often at odds with one another.

“Basel” begins with what the reader only later learns is a eulogy, written but because of its inappropriateness never delivered, by forty-four-year-old Nathan Zuckerman on the occasion of his brother Henry’s death at age thirty-nine. That discovery is just the first in a bewildering series of surprises in a novel of unexpected reversals that derive—or seem to derive—from Nathan’s efforts to understand his brother’s death and therefore his life in the only way Nathan knows, by writing about them. (Part 4 will suggest a very different, though parallel, point of departure for The Counterlife’s multiple narratives.) Henry elected surgery rather than accept the impotence that is a side effect of the drug prescribed to control his heart condition. Henry, it appears, wanted to become sexually active again in order to continue his affair with his dental assistant, Wendy, an affair that is itself the result of, as well as an attenuated version of, Henry’s tempestuous affair with a married Swiss woman named Maria some years before. That affair Henry has confessed to only one person, perversely enough, his brother Nathan, a novelist famous for turning family secrets into bestselling fiction. Having failed to give up his conventional life for a more satisfying, or at least exciting, counterlife in Switzerland with Maria, Henry chooses to risk death rather than give up his more perfunctory and even farcical after-hours dalliance with Wendy. This, of course, is not the version that Henry’s wife Carol offers in the eulogy she delivers in Nathan’s stead. Carol’s Henry is a dedicated family man willing to risk his life for the sake of a complete, which is to say sexually satisfying, marriage. Whether Carol actually believes this “version” of Henry, neither Nathan nor the reader can say for sure. What is clear is that in his uncertainty, Nathan finds ample room for narrative speculation.

Stories and counter-stories, as well as counterlives, continue to proliferate in part 2, “Judea.” Here Henry has survived not only surgery but also postoperative depression. He finds his cure for the latter in Israel, where he transforms himself into Hanoch, a disciple of a fanatical Zionist named Mordecai Lippman. A dismayed and desperate Carol dispatches Nathan—no longer living alone in New York but married to his very own and very English Maria—to bring Henry back to his senses and to his family. Although Nathan’s mission fails, his experiences in Israel cause him to ponder more deeply and more imaginatively Henry’s situation and his own, particularly as a Jewish American writer.

These speculations become the subject of the novel’s next section, “Aloft.” Aboard a flight from Tel Aviv to London, Nathan writes and rewrites a letter to Henry that he will never send and then ponders the letter that a friend, an Israeli journalist, gave him just before departure. His musings give way to farce when a fellow passenger dressed as a Hasidic Jew turns out to be Nathan’s biggest fan. Claiming Nathan as his inspiration, Jimmy Ben-Joseph Lustig tells Nathan that he is about to hijack the plane, though he also says that he is only joking. In any case, farce gives way to nightmare when two security men thwart the plan, if it is a plan, perhaps mistaking Jimmy’s joke, if it is a joke, for the real thing. Jimmy is brutally beaten, and Nathan tries, seemingly without success, to give his Kafkaesque interrogators what they want, an account of himself that they can believe.

In part 4, “Gloucestershire,” however, Nathan is the one with the heart problem and the desire to live a different life. He wants to live in London with Maria, who is not yet his wife, as she already was in “Judea.” Nathan desires exactly the kind of conventional life from which Henry wanted to escape in “Basel.” Now it is Henry who cannot deliver the eulogy and who listens to one he knows to be false. Afterward, he goes to his brother’s apartment, looking for the notebooks into which he is sure Nathan recorded Henry’s confession of his affair with Maria. Though he is aware of his brother’s propensity for “cannibalizing” family secrets for the sake of his fiction, Henry is still dismayed, as is the reader, though for a quite different reason, to find a manuscript labeled “Draft #2” which appears to be parts 1, 2, 3, and 5 of The Counterlife. Furious, Henry removes the incriminating sections and dumps them in a garbage bin at a rest stop along the Jersey Turnpike. At this point, the chapter switches form and point of view a second time. In an interview with a “restless soul,” presumably Nathan’s ghost, Maria discusses her visit to Nathan’s apartment and her decision to leave the manuscript as she found it, even though doing so will surely jeopardize her marriage. As the ghost shrewdly realizes, that may be the reason Maria leaves the manuscript intact, allowing it to do what she is too timid to.

Yet in “Christendom,” Nathan, like Henry in “Judea,” is back again, in London, following what is now described as a “quiet flight” (perhaps, therefore, with no attempted hijacking) from Israel. Maria is now, as she was in part 2, his wife. Nathan’s brief stay in Israel has, however, changed him, sensitizing (or perhaps oversensitizing) him to anti-Semitism, English style. At the restaurant to which he has taken Maria to celebrate her twenty-eighth birthday, Nathan sniffs anti-Semitism in another diner’s rather loud complaint about a foul smell. Well aware of her own mother’s anti-Semitism, Maria tries to calm Nathan; failing, she decides that perhaps a Jew and a Christian cannot live happily ever after. Alone at the house they are having renovated but have not yet occupied, Nathan wonders whether Maria may be gone for good, a possibility that Nathan, ever the novelist, quickly sees in narrative terms. First, he imagines her farewell note, in which she says she cannot endure “a lifetime of never knowing whether you’re fooling,” existing as nothing more than a character in some ongoing fiction of his devising. He then imagines his reply, which ends, as the novel does, “It may be as you say that this is no life, but use your enchanting, enrapturing brains: this life is as close to life as you, and I, and our child can ever hope to come.”

The Characters

In his family and educational background as well as his career as a novelist, Nathan Zuckerman is clearly Philip Roth’s self-confessed “front man,” alter ego, and all round ventriloquist’s dummy. Rejecting the role of “family id,” Zuckerman is perhaps most like Roth in the sense that Roth described himself in a 1984 interview as being “like somebody who is trying vividly to transform himself out of himself and into his vividly transforming heroes. I am like somebody who spends all day writing.” What makes it especially difficult, even risky, to discuss Nathan or indeed any of the The Counterlife’s characters with any degree of certainty is that they exist in several ontological and narrative states consecutively and at times concurrently. They are in a sense at once real (if the reader follows Coleridge’s advice and suspends disbelief, as most novels allow and require) and doubly fictitious (insofar as they are both Zuckerman’s and Roth’s creations). Although no less “real” or compelling than the characters in the novels of Jane Austen that Maria’s mother, Mrs. Freshfield, admires, they are far more elusive and problematic, for it is impossible to determine just where the facts of their lives leave off and Zuckerman’s as well as their own fictions begin. Henry, for example, seems entirely in character when he defends himself as one who lives with the facts, unlike Nathan who, fearing real life, spends his life trying to alter them from the safety of his study. But the Henry who makes this claim is, or may be, already as much a character in Nathan’s fiction and/or his own mind as he is in Roth’s novel.

On the one hand, the novel’s characters, including Nathan, are presented in quasi-allegorical fashion. Nathan “is” the family id, Henry is the successful professional firmly grounded in the reality principle (alternately the younger brother envious of what he takes to be Nathan’s irresponsible life of sexual excess). Mordecai Lippman is Zionism, and Maria is cast as “famous English insouciance” to Nathan’s equally famous and equally allegorical “Jewish intensity.” On the other hand, since, as Nathan claims, “playacting . . . may be the only authentic thing we ever do,” the characters seem far less stable than their allegorical meanings will allow and therefore far more open to the transformational possibilities that The Counterlife explores and exploits so comically and provocatively. Nathan is thus both the diaspora Jew and defender of the faith, depending on which country and in what chapter he happens to be at the time. With his Swiss mistress, Henry nearly overcomes his upper-middle-class inhibitions. Similarly, with his very English lover/wife, writer of “fluent cliches and fluffy ephemera for silly magazines,” Nathan, author of the aptly titled novel Carnovsky, expresses a very different kind of desire, “to give up the artificial fiction of being myself for the genuine, satisfying falseness of being somebody else.” All the while Nathan remains a writer, not distant from his work in the Joycean mode of a god paring his fingernails but implicated in it, obsessed with the problematic relation of life and art, with, as Nathan, or “Nathan,” puts it, “the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives that people turn stories into.”

Critical Context

Honored with a National Book Critics Circle Award, The Counterlife, Roth’s thirteenth book of fiction, continues and further complicates the story of the author’s most extensively portrayed and ambiguously angled alter ego. Nathan Zuckerman first appears as the main character in two stories by Peter Tarnopol, the main character in Roth’s My Life as a Man (1974); Tarnopol writes the stories as a form of therapy following a disastrous marriage clearly modeled on Roth’s own. From the role of protagonist in stories within a story, Nathan becomes a hero in his own right in The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), and The Anatomy Lesson (1983). The publication of all three Zuckerman novels in a single volume punningly titled Zuckerman Bound (1985), however, seemed to indicate that Roth was done with Zuckerman.

The Counterlife shows that he was not, shows that Zuckerman the sexually insatiable (as many of his readers believe him to be) is also Zuckerman the narratively indestructible and inexhaustible. The entire Zuckerman saga deals in fictional form with many of the same issues Roth felt compelled to address following the negative remarks made chiefly by Jewish readers and critics about Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and more especially Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), books that Roth rightly claimed were neither anti-Semitic nor unambiguously autobiographical except to the most literal-minded readers. Roth’s most direct responses to their charges are to be found in Reading Myself and Others (1975) and in the numerous interviews he has, often warily, given. In Zuckerman, Roth has found a way to deal with these same issues in a more imaginatively complex way, turning ad hominem misreadings to narrative advantage. Zuckerman figures importantly in The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988), more briefly in the novel Deception (1990), and more briefly still in Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993). In all these works, The Counterlife in particular, questions of simple autobiographical identity and equivalence dissolve in Roth’s dizzying and provocative brand of performance art, his seemingly endless variations on the theme of metamorphosis.

Bibliography

Furman, Andrew. “A New Other’ Emerges in American Jewish Literature: Philip Roth’s Israel Fiction.” Contemporary Literature 36 (Winter, 1995): 633-653. Explores the Jewish literary theme that centers on Israel and projects the concept of “Other” on the Arab. Although Roth seems to have escaped this literary trend, Furman argues that in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock, Roth subtly reiterates the Other.

Halkin, Hillel. “How to Read Philip Roth.” Commentary 97 (February, 1994): 43-45. Although some critics maintain that Roth is steering away from themes of Judaism, Halkin argues that his later works contain strong Jewish themes. Offers critical analyses of several of Roth’s novels, including The Counterlife.

Lyons, Bonnie. “ Jew on the Brain’ in Wrathful Phillipics.’” Studies in American Jewish Literature 8 (Fall, 1989): 186-195. Lyons reads The Counterlife in relation to the other Zuckerman writings. She concludes that the novel’s strength derives from Roth’s handling of the variety of Jewish identities.

Searles, George J., ed. Conversations with Philip Roth. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Reprints thirty-eight interviews with Roth. Extended discussions of The Counterlife appear in the interviews by Mervyn Rothstein, Paul Gray, Alvin Sanoff, Katherine Weber, and Hermione Lee. Includes a brief introduction and a useful chronology.

Shechner, Mark. “Zuckerman’s Travels.” In The Conversion of the Jews and Other Essays. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Shechner argues that the importance of The Counterlife derives from its combination of “theatrical lightness” and “historical density.” Shechner’s essay should be read in connection with his lengthier discussion of Roth’s earlier work in After the Revolution: Studies in the Contemporary Jewish American Imagination (1987).

Shostak, Debra. “ This Obsessive Reinvention of the Real’: Speculative Narrative in Philip Roth’s The Counterlife.” Modern Fiction Studies 37 (Summer, 1991): 197-215. Shostak reads the novel as a “speculative” fiction about “the sources, meaning, and power of narrative” and about the self as narrative. Roth’s “commitment to—and redefinition of—the real’” enables him to transcend “the implicit nihilism and anxiety of the postmodern decentered or indefinite self.”