The Varnished Truths of Philip Roth

By Paul Gray

Some 30 pages into Philip Roth's new novel, a character named Henry Zuckerman comes up with a decidedly odd idea. The setting is Henry's dental office in northern New Jersey; the atmosphere shimmers with the sexual tension generated for weeks now by the presence of Wendy, Dr. Zuckerman's new employee. " 'Look,' he said, 'let's pretend. You're the assistant and I'm the dentist.' 'But I am the assistant,' Wendy said. 'I know,' he replied, 'and I'm the dentist -- but pretend anyway.' " This fiction seems indistinguishable from the facts of the matter. But once the artifice begins, so does the fun.

Others can play make-believe, of course; Roth has argued for years that everyone does so all the time. So let's pretend. Philip, the younger son of Herman and Bess Roth, was born in Newark in 1933. He . . . he was born in Newark . . . grew up loving baseball and enjoying summer outings to the Jersey shore. He was a bright student, and after graduating from Weequahic High School in 1950, he spent a year at the Newark extension of Rutgers University. Then, wanting to see something of the world outside his hometown, he transferred to Bucknell in central Pennsylvania, where he acted in college drama productions; founded, wrote for and edited a literary magazine; and graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in English.

Where next? Well, say he took an M.A. at the University of Chicago and decided to go on for the Ph.D. He met and married Margaret Martinson, the mother of two children by a previous marriage. When his first attempts at short stories were routinely rejected, Roth gave up his literary aspirations and buckled down to his academic career. He earned his doctorate and went on to teaching positions at the University of Iowa and Princeton. The Roths live in suburban Philadelphia, where he is a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. His critical books include The Jewish American Novel: Is Enough Enough? and Franz Kafka: The Sit-Down Comic.

It could have happened that way. In fact, a lot of it did. But this refraction of reality is not nearly as interesting as it might be. To punch it up a bit, suppose that Roth's fiction was clamorously acclaimed; that his first published volume, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), won the National Book Award and made the author a name to be reckoned with at 27. Implausible, true, but more dramatic than the other version. And what about that happily-ever-after marriage? Maybe it lasted only a few years before plummeting into an acrimonious separation in 1963 that left Roth deep in debt, thanks to legal expenses, and sent him reeling into five years of psychoanalysis. Awful, but for the sake of the narrative not bad. Right about here a reversal of fortune would do nicely. So our hero wrote Portnoy's Complaint (1969), the novel that made him rich, famous and controversial. Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy were snapped up by Hollywood. And then . . . and then Roth fell in love with a movie star.

That last touch may strike some as overdoing it. But going too far has been a hallmark of Roth's fiction from the beginning. His early stories provoked some Jewish readers to condemn him for anti-Semitism; Portnoy gave him a reputation as a sex maniac. His three books about Nathan Zuckerman, The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981) and The Anatomy Lesson (1983), have led to charges that Roth is trapped in narcissistic reverie, writing about a writer who resembles himself. As if thumbing his nose at such comments, the author now offers The Counterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 324 pages; $18.95). It features, naturally, Nathan Zuckerman.

There are other things in this novel that Roth's detractors will probably dislike. Nathan, a self-conscious fellow, does not allow the reader to forget that the words on the page are made up, inventions: "Being Zuckerman is one long performance and the very opposite of what is thought of as being oneself." So much for sincere, straight-from-the-shoulder storytelling. People who want to know what really happens in a work of fiction, a peculiar but widespread desire, are going to find themselves bewildered. Only one incontestable fact can be gleaned from the book: The Counterlife got written.

And written, it should be added, with Roth's customary verve, wit and intelligence. It hardly matters that the plot does not flow forward but rather screeches to a number of halts, that each new beginning is a refutation of what has gone before. The individual scenes inspire absolute belief; Roth's art is such that he can make events seem not only plausible but inescapable even while announcing over and over again that none of them occurred.

The complications of The Counterlife ripple out from a central conceit. A man with a heart condition finds that the medication he must take renders him impotent. Hence Henry Zuckerman, 39, faces the bleak prospect of life without any more after-work office trysts with his alluring assistant. Similarly, Henry's famous older brother Nathan, 45, cannot marry an Englishwoman named Maria and create both the child and the settled life that, after three failed marriages, he now desperately wants. The only solution in both cases is bypass surgery. The Zuckerman brothers face the same difficult choice, but for diametrically opposed reasons. Henry, the responsible family man, has to decide whether to put his life on the line for a fling; Nathan, the notorious womanizer and hedonist with money to burn and an immaculate Manhattan apartment, must risk all for fatherhood.

Both brothers go under the knife and never emerge. Life is unfair, and fiction can be even worse. But what transpires in a novel need not be irreversible. So Henry may survive instead and go to Israel, where he joins a settlement on the West Bank and tries to find, or lose, himself in Jewish history. Nathan may come out of the operating room a new man, get married and move to England with his lovely and reassuringly pregnant wife. Other variations surface. Perhaps Nathan alone dies, and Henry, going through his late brother's effects, comes upon the manuscript of a book that has chapters with the same titles, in the same order, as The Counterlife. Henry reads about his alleged affair with Wendy and becomes enraged: "Of all the classics of irresponsible exaggeration, this was the filthiest, most recklessly irresponsible of all."

It is also possible that Nathan has dreamed up this scene, further slandering Henry by portraying his imaginary outrage at being lied about and exploited in the first place. If Nathan is indeed guilty of such cold, despotic manipulation, then Maria's sense of uneasiness in his presence makes perfect sense. Near the end, she informs Nathan, "I'm leaving you and I'm leaving the book."

Much will be made of the technical virtuosity of The Counterlife, with the result that readers who might love the novel may be driven away. No one but members of creative-writing programs or departments of literature should sit still for another recitative of postmodernism's bag of tricks. The text, you see, is the generator of life, not its transcript; the only real plot that stories convey is the process of their telling. Or, as Nathan writes in a letter to Henry, "We are all the invention of each other, everybody a conjuration conjuring up everyone else. We are all each other's authors." Or, as Maria observes, "I know characters rebelling against their author has been done before."

Indeed it has. But Roth manages to draw blood from stony precepts. His novel is an elaborate verbal gesture; it is also an impassioned portrayal of the moral choices open to living, breathing men and women, a mirror of a familiar world rendered mysterious and magical. The Counterlife is a metaphysical thriller; the quarry is nothing less than the elusive nature of truth.

The three years Roth spent writing The Counterlife have left him satisfied ("I gave it my all") and resigned to the prospect of being misunderstood once again. He expresses hope that Nathan's putative death in the novel will discourage people from reading his fiction as autobiography, but he is not optimistic. "I write about what could have happened," he says, "not what did happen. Why that's so hard to grasp I don't understand. I have once in a while started off just setting down some incident I'd actually gone through and I can hardly get past the first paragraph without veering off into something that didn't happen, which is always more interesting. I'm highly sensitive to boredom. I think it's an occupational requirement."

To the unpracticed eye, Roth's ordinary routine might seem the epitome of boredom. His favorite place to write is a gray colonial 1790 farmhouse set on roughly 40 acres of land in Connecticut's Litchfield County. He bought the place in 1972, in part to get away from the demands and notoriety that had hounded him after Portnoy. He got plenty of solitude for his money, sometimes, he acknowledges, a bit too much: "Night up here can come down like a heavy thing." Before that happens, Roth has usually put in a reclusive day. By 9:30 each morning he has walked some 50 yards from his house to a two-room cottage that serves as his study. He emerges around 1 for lunch and then disappears until 4:30 in the afternoon, when it is time for a swim in his pool or, if the weather has turned chilly, for a six-mile walk. He spends evenings listening to classical music and reading.

Roth's monastic schedule varies only a little when Actress Claire Bloom, 55, is in residence. The two have lived together since 1976 and occasionally worked together as well. His co-adaptation of The Ghost Writer appeared on PBS's American Playhouse in 1984, with Bloom playing a woman trapped in her writer-husband's hermetic life somewhere in New England. Roth and Bloom are hardly trapped; they now divide each year between Connecticut and her house in London. "We try not to be apart for more than a month at a time," says Roth. The author and the actress are, in some ways, an odd match; she needs people, other actors, crews, audiences for her work just as much as he requires isolation for his. So when Bloom is in rural Connecticut, her enforced idleness leads to a good deal of teasing banter. He: "There is no social life around here." She (to a visitor): "That's what he keeps telling me." He: "Nobody goes to parties. Hey, I got you a telephone, didn't I?"

Actually, he is not as curmudgeonly as this byplay suggests. In Connecticut, Roth and Bloom regularly see such neighboring friends as Arthur Miller, Richard Widmark and William Styron; London, her turf, involves plenty of evenings with theater and literary people, including Harold Pinter and Lady Antonia Fraser.

Another form of recreation for Roth is travel. In the early '70s, he left for Prague. An impression later arose that he went to Czechoslovakia out of guilt, a rich American attempting to atone for his success by visiting oppressed Soviet-bloc writers. "Guilt?" Roth asks. "I was out to have a good time." But he found Prague "overwhelming within an hour. I felt, as I did when I went to Jerusalem later, that this was a place I had to see again."

He made visits each spring and friends among Czech artists. This experience had literary consequences: The Prague Orgy, a novella recounting Nathan Zuckerman's misadventures in that city, included as the coda for the trilogy published as Zuckerman Bound (1985); and Roth's editorship of a series, "Writers from the Other Europe," which has given Eastern European writers exposure in the West. Roth's access to Prague ended in the mid-'70s, when his visa was not renewed. He had been tailed and questioned there, as had those who associated with him. "After I left one time," he recalls, "the authorities went to one of my Czech friends and demanded to know what Roth was up to, what does he want here. My friend answered, 'Haven't you read his books? He comes for the girls.' "

The distraction from his work Roth most willingly tolerates is baseball. "My fandom," he says, without a trace of irony, "is the most interesting fact of my life." He talks eagerly about going to games as a boy and watching the old Newark Bears of the International League along with his older brother Sanford and his father, now a retired insurance-company executive. His boyhood passion was the Brooklyn Dodgers. "I went off to college, and then the Dodgers went off to L.A.," he says, shaking his head. Eventually, he transferred his allegiance to the New York Mets. Last summer he had a dish antenna installed atop an outbuilding on the Connecticut property so he could follow the fortunes of the Mets on the road.

He also had lunch with Keith Hernandez, the Mets' All Star first baseman. Describing this event, Roth seems star struck. "I asked him whether he read stories in the papers the next day about the game he'd played in the night before. You know what he said? 'Why should I? I know what happened.' I realized then why I don't have to read reviews of my books. I know what happened."

"If I ever wrote an autobiography," he says, "I'd call it The Counterbook." The prospect seems unlikely. Bare facts alone do not particularly interest Roth, nor does the unfettered imagination. His specialty is the varnished truth. Life offers problems for the writer to rephrase: "The radical restructuring of questions is what gives me my books. My gift is to pretend." The closest he has come to displaying himself directly in fiction is probably in a 1973 essay/story, "I Always Wanted You to Admire My Fasting"; or, Looking at Kafka. Prospective biographers may imagine this piece to be a trove of information, a crucial key to the Roth enigma. The narrator is called Roth by his friends, he has an older brother, the year is 1942, and the setting is Newark. The only jarring note among these corresponding details is that young Roth's Hebrew teacher happens to be Franz Kafka, somehow risen from his grave in Prague and an immigrant in America. When asked if this narrative is not autobiographical, save for that one outrageous detail, the author confesses at last. "I'll tell you the truth. Kafka was my Hebrew teacher. Only my name is not Roth."