Deception

This book of lovers, overheard, voicing their secrets, is Philip Roth's most erotically original work of fiction since Portnoy's Complaint.

“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 thirties, she is already nervously half-resigned. The action consists of conversation — mainly the lovers talking to each other before and after making love. 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.

“A fiendishly clever piece of work . . . an amazing feat. . . . He’s invented the purest speech, the most convincing cadences, of any American novelist.” — William Pritchard, Hudson Review

Publishers Weekly

Conversations, most of them between an American writer living in London and his English mistress, make up what PW called ``a clever comedy of manners that segues--as is the author's wont--into a disquisition on the distinction between literature and life.'' (Feb.)

Award-winning author Philip Roth has made a career of confronting the heartbreaking dissolution of relationships, the absurdity of sexual neuroses, and the downside of his own literary fame. Many of his readers believe that Roth has been merely writing his own story for nearly fifty years. However, the author refuses to offer such speculators any simple answers, saying of his characters, It's all me. Nothing is me."