The Counterlife by Philip Roth

• Synopsis
• Selected Passages
• Review Essay
• Questions for Discussion
• Order this book from our bookstore

Synopsis from the Publisher:

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 mind 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.

Selected Passages:

Standing singly at the Wall, some rapidly swaying and rhythmically bobbing as they recited their prayers, others motionless but for the lightning flutter of their mouths, were seventeen of the world’s twelve million Jewish communing with the King of the Universe. To me it looked as though they were communing solely with the stones in whose crevices pigeons were roosting some twenty feet above their heads. I thought (as I am predisposed to think), “If there is a God who plays a role in our world, I will eat every hat in this town” – nonetheless, I couldn’t help but be gripped by the sight of this rock-worship, exemplifying as it did to me the most awesomely retarded aspect of the human mind. Rock is just right, I thought: what on earth could be less responsive? Even the cloud drifting by overhead. . . appeared less indifferent to our encompassed and uncertain existence. I think that I would have felt less detached from seventeen Jews who openly admitted that they were talking to rock than from these seventeen who imagined themselves telexing the Creator directly; had I known for sure it was rock and rock alone that they knew they were addressing, I might even have joined in. Kissing God’s ass, Shuki had called it, with more distaste than I could muster. I was simply reminded of my lifelong disaffection from such rites.

Zionism, as I understand it, originated not only in the deep Jewish dream of escaping the danger of insularity and the cruelties of social injustice and persecution but out of a highly conscious desire to be divested of virtually everything that had come to seem, to the Zionists as much as to the Christian Europeans, distinctively Jewish behavior --- to reverse the very form of Jewish existence. The construction of a counterlife that is one's own anti-myth was at its very core. It was a species of fabulous utopianism, a manifesto for human transformation....

“We’re going to ask you to give an account of yourself,” the Broadway hustler said to me. “An account that we can believe.”

“I can do that. I’m on you side.”

“Oh, are you? Isn’t that nice. How many more of you boys we got on board today?”

“I don’t think there’s anyone. I don’t think he’s a terrorist – he’s just psychotic.”

“But you were with him. So what are you?”

“My name is Nathan Zuckerman. I’m an American, a writer. I was in Israel visiting my brother. Henry Zuckerman. Hanoch. He’s at an ulpan in the West Bank.”

“The West what? If that’s the West Bank, where’s the East Bank? Why do you speak in Arab political nomenclature about a ‘West Bank’?”

“I don’t. I was visiting my brother and now I’m going back to London, where I live.”

“Why do you live in London? London is like f - -ing Cairo. In the hotels the Arabs sh - -t in the swimming pools. Why do you live there?”

“I’m married to an English woman.”

“I thought you were American.”

“I am. I’m a writer. I wrote a book called Carnovsky. I’m quite well known, if that’s any help.”

“If you’re so well known, why are you so thick with a psychotic? Give me an account of yourself that I can believe . . .”

Review Essay by Philip Graubart

Philip Roth’s brilliant novel, The Counterlife, begins with one middle-aged man facing impotence, and ends, 324 pages later, with another middle-age man, the first one’s brother, contemplating his erection. You don’t have to be Freud to understand that the journey from flaccidity to potency symbolizes the road from death to life. Death and life are what Roth presents in his masterpiece – and the decisions we make which can send us in either direction. But this is no somber, meditative book, and though plenty of penises make their appearances, it’s in no way pornographic. It is, in fact, a wildly funny, noisy, argumentative novel – far and away Roth’s best book – offering his most fully realized artistic vision of contemporary Jewish identity.

Like much of Roth’s best work, literary styles clang together in startling juxtaposition. A burlesque scene where an Israeli airplane is nearly hijacked follows moments of tenderness, where two estranged brothers recall playing together as children, wearing matching pajamas – one kissing the other on the forehead every night before bed. Comic caricatures of West Bank fanatics and eccentric anti-Semites mix with thoughtful meditations on the meaning of the self. Somehow the odd jumble of styles works, giving us a rich, complex book, which is neither difficult nor wordy.

Roth’s most obvious theme is the great variety of ways one can live Jewishly in today’s world. Here The Counterlife reminds me of Chaim Grade’s classic Yiddish story “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” which presents an argument between a secular and Orthodox Jew in the wake of the Holocaust. But Roth’s book is like Grade on speed. Where Grade gives us two styles of Jewishness, Roth presents at least six: the secular American-Jewish intellectual, the Orthodox Jew, the Israeli nationalist, the secular Israeli intellectual, the assimilated Jew who thinks very little about Judaism, and the assimilated Jew whose identity only asserts itself because of anti-Semitism. And where Grade’s characters argue passionately but respectfully, Roth’s Jews shout each other down, or talk past each other, each insisting on the sole authenticity of their particular path.

While The Counterlife is unquestioningly Roth’s most Jewish work, it’s ultimately about a more universal subject: the power of the imagination to help us escape one reality and shape another. The main characters are two brothers, the dentist Henry Zuckerman, and the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. Roth gives each brother the same dilemma. In two separate fictional realities, heart diseases forces one, then the other to use a medicine that, as a side effect, causes impotence. The brothers can either live sex-less lives or risk death by submitting to bypass surgery. Both opt for surgery, but, for each brother, Roth writes two possible outcomes – two counterlives. In the first section of the novel, “Basel,” heart surgery has killed Henry. Nathan, reflecting on his brother’s death, tells the story first of Henry’s many meaningless extra-marital affairs, and then of the one torrid relationship that gave his brother a chance to escape a loveless marriage. This section’s themes are impotence, disappointment and futility. In “Judea,” the second section, Henry survives surgery and moves to a settlement on the occupied West Bank. Nathan, still narrating, follows his brother to Israel. There he finds vivid, frightening characters eager to grab history by the throat and take control of Jewish destiny. The tone here is agitated, colorful, vital, potent. In the fourth section, “Gloucestershire,” it’s Nathan who dies on the operating table, and Henry who reflects on Nathan’s pathetic, love-less life. The last section, “Christendom,” features a recovered Nathan – fully alive, living with his beautiful young wife, and about to become a father for the first time. As in “Judea,” the characters in “Christendom,” are baroque, eccentric, and unmistakably alive. The final scene echoes the structure of the entire book. Zuckerman fights with his wife; she threatens to leave. Roth writes two possible endings. In the first, Zuckerman’s wife writes him that she’s left – not just the marriage, but the book. She’s returned to the first husband she doesn’t love, and, while she’s at it, resigned from the novel. In the second ending, Zuckerman begs her to stay, and, to convince her, invites her to contemplate hiserect penis. The novel concludes with primal images of fertility and potency. With all of these imagined lives, deaths, and counterlives, Roth gives us the clear impression that, ultimately, it’s the creative imagination that decides our fate. Nathan and Henry face divorce and disease but Roth imagines for them not just death and loneliness, but life. The imagination has the power to liberate us from both the ravages of the body and from sadness. As Nathan writes to his wife, “We can pretend to be anything we want. All it takes is impersonation.”

In this sense, The Counterlife is easily Roth’s most hopeful work. At the end of Sabbath's Theater, a more recent Roth novel which won a National Book Award, Mickey Sabbath, the main character - a broken down old rogue - marvels, at his inability to die. “He could not f - -cking die,” he says, mixing undeniable vitality with frustration. But The Counterlife ends with the coming of a new baby. Here Roth is not just celebrating our dogged resistance to death, he’s celebrating life. In The Human Stain, another recent book, Roth explicitly illustrates the grossness of the human condition – a condition, which, as the title makes clear, befouls the natural world. But in The Counterlife, Roth glorifies the human touch. Arguing with his wife in favor of circumcision, Nathan insists, “Circumcision is startling, all right, particularly when performed by a garlicked old man upon the glory of a newborn body. . . Circumcision is everything that the pastoral is not, and, to my mind, reinforces what the world is about, which isn’t strife less unity. . . circumcision gives the lie to the womb-dream of life in the beautiful state of innocent prehistory, the appealing idyll of living naturally, unencumbered by man-made ritual.”

In fact, for a writer often accused of misanthropy, Roth seems to go out of his way in The Counterlife to celebrate human life. With all the clanging dichotomies of this powerful novel – secular/religious, Jew/Gentile, Israel/Diaspora, natural/human, man/woman, artist/philistine – the most glaring is death and life. Roth reminds us that there are conditions that lead to death. But until death hits us, with all its finality, we can choose something else. We can re-write our fate, imagine an alternative – a counterlife. We can choose life.

Questions for Discussion:

1.) In Roth’s most popular novel, Portnoy's Complaint, Alex Portnoy, the protagonist, complains about his parent’s parochialism with the famous words “Jew, Jew, Jew! I also happen to be a human being!” In The Counterlife, Henry accuses Nathan, a writer very much like Philip Roth of “having Jew on the brain.” Later Henry reminds Nathan, “we’re not just Jews, we’re human beings!” Has Philip Roth changed his mind about the value of his Jewish identity?

2.) Like Philip Roth, Nathan Zuckerman is a famous American-Jewish novelist who has written a controversial best-seller about the dilemmas of modern Jewish life. Is The Counterlife just a particularly creative form of memoir or autobiography? Or is it truly fiction? Do Nathan’s views on Israel, Jewish identity, life and love, reflect Roth’s views? Or are they just the views of a fictional character?

3.) On pages 60-61 (paperback), Henry describes how a visit to a run-down school in an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood of Jerusalem convinces him to become Orthodox and move to the West Bank. Do you find Henry’s story convincing? How would you respond to Henry if he were your brother?

4.) Shuki, Nathan’s Israeli intellectual friend, is afraid that Nathan will find Mordechai Lippman, the radical Israeli nationalist, to be “vivid,” and “interesting.” In fact, Roth creates a vivid and interesting character in Lippman - a person whose verbal skills surpass Nathan’s. Yet Shuki says he “smells facism” when he thinks of Lippman. What does Philip Roth really think of Mordechai Lippman?

5.) In The Counterlife Roth celebrates re-imagining one’s self as a form of liberation. Nathan praises Israel as “a whole country imagining itself, asking itself, ‘What the is this business of being a Jew?’” Is Philip Roth a Zionist?

6.) On page 84 (paperback), when Nathan visits the Western Wall in Jerusalem, he says, “It was more impressive than I’d anticipated.” He later describes, with great tenderness, an old man kissing the wall. Re-read the scene of Nathan’s visit to the Wall on pages 84-87. Why is this secular writer so moved by this sacred site?

7.) In the “Aloft” section, Nathan’s stoned friend Jimmy threatens to hijack an El-Al jet in order to publicize his demand that the Jewish people “forget remembering.” Re-read Jimmy’s manifesto on page 165. What do you think of Jimmy’s ideas? Is this just the ranting of a drug addict? Or, does Roth expect us to take Jimmy seriously?

8.) Why does Nathan, after much consideration, condemn Henry’s decision to move to Israel, become Orthodox, and change his name to Hanoch as “uninteresting?” Does Nathan really think this dramatic transformation is uninteresting? What do you think of Henry’s changes?

9.) Maria accuses Nathan, in effect, of taking his own personal dilemmas and dressing them up as serious issues of contemporary Jewish identity. Does Nathan really care about the problems of modern Jewish identity? Or does he just care about himself?

10.) Philip Roth has often been accused of antagonism towards women. What do you think of the important women characters in this novel (Maria, Carol, Sarah)? Do you find evidence of hostility to women in The Counterlife?

11.) What do you think of first Henry’s and then Nathan’s decision to risk death in order to restore their ability to have an erection? Do you admire the decision?

12.) In the final pages of the novel, Nathan offers an elaborate theory of the self. Among other things, he writes, “If there even is a natural being, an irreducible self, it is rather small, I think, and may even be the root of all impersonation – the natural being may be the skill itself, the innate capacity to impersonate.” Re-read pages 320-321. What do you think of Nathan’s theories of the self.

13.) The novel concludes with Nathan’s plea to Maria that she return. Does Roth want us to believe that they will ultimately get back together?

14.) What does Nathan mean, on page 321-322 that a film of a penis ejaculating is “the pastoral landscape par excellence?”

15.) Is The Counterlife a Jewish book?