“With the lover everyday life recedes,” Roth writes – and exhibiting all his skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, he presents in Deception the tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction.
At the center of Deception are two adulterers in their hiding place. He is a middle-aged American writer named Philip, living in London, and she is an articulate, intelligent, well-educated Englishwoman compromised by a humiliating marriage to which, in her 30s, she is already nervously half-resigned.
That dialogue – sharp, rich, playful, inquiring, “moving”, as Hermione Lee writes, “on a scale of pain from furious bafflement to stoic gaiety” – is nearly all there is to this audiobook, and all there needs to be.
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth’s fiction-often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey-is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its “sensual, ingenious style” and for its provocative explorations of American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy’s Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.Roth was one of the most honored American writers of his generation. He received the National Book Critics Circle award for The Counterlife, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman, a second National Book Award for Sabbath’s Theater, and the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 2005, the Library of America began publishing his complete works, making him the second author so anthologized while still living, after Eudora Welty. Harold Bloom named him one of the four greatest American novelists of his day, along with Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo. In 2001, Roth received the inaugural Franz Kafka Prize in bride swedish Prague.
Community Reviews
I finished my 2020 reading year with Philip Roth’s magnificent debut collection Goodbye, Columbus, and consequently dubbed him a mensch. All the while I had this nefarious, impudent novel on its way to me, and I knew the compliment probably wouldn’t apply for long.
The book brags that it’s “erotically original”. Well, I already read his Portnoy’s Complaint in which Monsieur Portnoy jerks off in the bathroom while his hysterical mother screams from the other side. Sigh. Dick Lit. A little something told me that I just might want to throw this book at the wall. Mensch, shmensch.
But I was intrigued, because I’m. me. It’d been a year or two since Roth had annoyed me. Besides, I really wanted to read a book comprised of conversations taking place pre and post coitus between two lovers who were married to other people. So, I was willing to take the risk.
The verdict? It’s really a mixed bag. Written in 1990 when Roth was 57, with over a dozen novels under his belt, it’s evident he was at a point in his career where he was free to do what he wanted, to experiment a bit. That’s what he was doing here. He decided, “I’m gonna write a book with only dialogue, dammit.” The novel is pretty much all dialogue, similar to Nicholson Baker’s Vox. But very little sex talk, which is unlike Nicholson Baker’s Vox. For a book that’s being touted as “erotically original”, there is precious little eros here. Huh.
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