The Gripes of Roth

The Counterlife

By Phillip Roth

Farrar Straus Giroux; 324 pages.

THERE IS NO reality in Phillip Roth's new novel. The Counterlife is a story with so many U-turns and abrupt stops that it leaves the reader befuddled about what to believe or not to believe about Roth's fictional world. Roth, an old master, has created a story without the traditional beginning, middle and end, and by doing so he provides insight into his art.

As the title indicates, this latest volume in the trilogy about the author Nathan Zuckerman--who no doubt is modeled somewhat after Roth--is a story about opposing lives. First there is the opposition between Nathan and his brother Henry, a successful suburban dentist in South Orange, New Jersey. Then there is the counterlife that Henry decides to live in Israel and the counterlife that Nathan decides to live in England. The interaction between these various worlds and people provides the canvas on which Roth paints his vision of his Jewishness.

But at the end of the novel the reader is rudely awakened from his pleasant position in front of the fire, curled up with this good book, to discover that what he has been reading is a complete lie. The novel by Roth is a book about Nathan writing a novel.

The twist in The Counterlife is more confusing and shocking than the old "Alice has been dreaming" ploy, because Roth plays with the reader's fundamental desire to accept the world on the pages of the book. It somehow leaves the reader with an empty feeling to discover that Roth has published a novel written by one of his fictional characters. Yet this duality provides an insight into Roth's own mind.

ROTH IS A person divided, and the cause of this schism in his personality shouldn't surprise the reader. In writing about the life of Jews in the U.S., Roth confronts head on his own split between his origins in a Jewish ghetto in New Jersey and the urbane literary worldliness that he has now developed. The Counterlife doesn't stray far from its literary antecedents set in and around Newark, New Jersey, but there is a sense that Roth is uprooted.

Roth is alienated both from the old country of Eastern Europe that spawned his immigrant parents and from the pleasant diaspora, non-tenemant nest that American Jews have created for themselves. The novel's homebase is this world. Nathan lives in New York City and his brother in South Orange, a suburb of Newark, where the two brothers grew up. Roth has written about these places before. His first great novel, Goodbye, Columbus, takes place in Irvington, New Jersey, a city that borders on Newark. Roth himself grew up in Newark and Irvington.

Unsatisfied with the cushy life of the modern Jewish ghetto, the brothers Zuckerman look for something new. Roth equates life in the New York City metropolitan area with impotency, and the brothers' quest is tied up with their effort to regain their potency. It seems as if circumcision, even at eight days old, leaves lasting scars.

In their search the brothers choose two extremes. One looks for truth by totally assimilating himself into christendom. The other chooses separatism by going to Israel. One marries a shiksa and the other goes to Israel and becomes a fanatical Zionist. But in neither case does Roth--the master puppeteer behind all the levels of unreality at work here--seem satisfied with the answers the two brothers provide to the dilemma of Jewishness in the modern world.

Roth sums up the struggles he has had being a writer with a decidedly ethnic identity and a comfortable, college-educated American Jew in the age of Israel and the diaspora. It wasn't supposed to happen this way, all Jews were supposed to want to return to Israel. But even if the story he tells leaves us baffled in the end, at least he provides an answer to his dilemma.

A Jew is a singular type to be understood in different ways by different people--like "a glass apple." This is the novel where Roth puts it all together and resolves the tension in his life that probably led him to write in the first place.