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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.