The Counterlife
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Overview
The Counterlife is about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Wherever they may find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate.Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through the book's evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the miind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the skeptical, enveloping intelligence that calculates the price that's paid in the struggle to change personal fortune and reshape history, whether in a dentist's office in suburban New Jersey, or in a tradition-bound English Village in Gloucestershire, or in a church in London's West End, or in a tiny desert settlement in Israel's occupied West Bank.
Novelist Nathan Zuckerman grapples with families, impotence, religion and life after death.
Synopsis
This radical work, whose protagonist is the novelist Nathan Zuckerman, ranges from a Christmas Carol service in London's West End to a Sabbath evening celebration in Israel's occupied West Bank. It suceeds in evoking both the nationalist militancy within modern Israel and the coded but palpable manifestations of anti-Semitism in establishment England.
Library Journal
One of Roth's "Zuckerman" books, The Counterlife follows protagonist Nathan Zuckerman from New York to Israel to London. "Along the way, monologues, eulogies, letters, interviews, and conversations ponder Judaism and Zionism, the nature of personality, the competing claims of imagination and life, and sex" (LJ 2/15/87).