Synopsis
At its heart lies the marriage of Peter and Maureen Tarnopol, a gifted young writer and the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead is his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and shored up by moral blackmail, but it is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen’s death, Peter is still trying—and failing—to write his way free of it. Out of desperate inventions and cauterizing truths, acts of weakness, tenderheartedness, and shocking cruelty, Philip Roth creates a work worthy of Strinberg—a fierce tragedy of sexual need and blindness.
Library Journal
Roth's seventh novel, first published in 1974, introduces Peter Tarnopol and Nathan Zuckerman, characters who persist in Roth's subsequent works recounting middle age in midcentury American Jewish life. Here, two short stories foreshadowing some of Tarnopol's life issues are followed by a lengthier feature fleshing out these concerns. Tricked into an unhappy marriage to Maureen Ketterer, Peter pursues an affair with charming, rich, devoted Susan Seabury McCall. His conflicted ambivalence between the two consumes him emotionally until Maureen's accidental death. In this first commercial audio recording of My Life, actor/musician Dan John Miller sounds just as one imagines Peter would in telling his story; Maureen's and Susan's characters come across equally as well. Recommended as a classic of American literature.—Sandy Glover, Camas P.L., WA