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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."