The Counterlife: A Novel

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER

“Magnificent … splendid…. I hope The Counterlife felt, as Mr. Roth wrote it, like a triumph, because that is certainly how it reads to me.” —New York Times Book Review

Philip Roth's alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman appears alongside his relatives, friends, and lovers at watershed moments, in this skeptical evaluation of the calculations we make as we seek our fortunes, try to alter the course of history, or simply stake our claim on a small piece of the world.

The Counterlife takes us inside the mind of Nathan Zuckerman as he examines characters in surreal moments of transition across life times and around the world. In New Jersey, Nathan's estranged brother, a dentist, struggles with impotence, infidelity, and a lethal heart condition. In Gloucestershire, Nathan risks it all to reverse his own sexual dysfunction and settle down with an ideal English family woman. In the West Bank, Nathan enters a cult-like settlement and attempts to extricate his brainwashed brother.

“Roth is a comic genius…. In this book (wonderfully sharp, worryingly intense) he is an electrifier.”  - Martin Amis, The Atlantic

“No other writer combines such a surface of colloquial relaxation and even dishevelment with such a dense load of mediating intelligence…. Roth has never written more scrupulously or, in spots, more lovingly. - John Updike, The New Yorker

“Magnificent … splendid…. I hope The Counterlife felt, as Mr. Roth wrote it, like a triumph, because that is certainly how it reads to me.” - New York Times Book Review

"Boisterously serious, dense, fizzing and formally audacious…The final thing that needs to be said about The Counterlife…is that it’s fucking funny." - Julian Barnes, London Review of Books