Philip Roth

Novels and Other Narratives 1986–1991

The Counterlife • The Facts • Deception • Patrimony

This fifth volume of The Library of America's definitive edition of Philip Roth's collected works presents four books that exemplify the description of Roth, proposed by British novelist Anthony Burgess, as a writer "who never steps twice into the same river."

The Counterlife (1986) is a book of astonishing 180-degree turns, of conflicting perspectives and points of view, and, by far, Roth's most radical novel to date. The subject is people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Illuminating these lives in transition is the skeptical, enveloping intelligence of the writer Nathan Zuckerman.

In 1987, a year after the imaginative extravaganza of The Counterlife, Roth reverses field with The Facts, the first of the "Roth Books." The Facts presents the author's own battles defictionalized and unadorned, and concludes with the unique assault that Roth mounts against his own proficiencies as an autobiographer.

At the center of the second of the Roth Books, Deception (1990), are a married American named Philip, living in London, and the married Englishwoman—trapped with a little child in a loveless upper-middle-class household—who eloquently and minutely reveals herself to her lover as they talk before and after making love. With the skill of a brilliant observer of the illicit and the intimate, Roth presents the highly enclosed world of adultery with a directness that has no equal in American fiction.

In the third Roth Book, Patrimony (1991), Philip Roth watches as Herman Roth, his 86-year-old father—famous for his vigor, his charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections—battles with the brain tumor that will kill him. The son accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, revealing the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished Herman's passionate engagement with life.

Ross Miller, editor, is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut and has taught at Yale, Wesleyan, and Trinity College. His criticism has appeared in scholarly journals, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times. He is the author of American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago and Here's the Deal: The Buying and Selling of a Great American City.

Other volumes in the Library of America Philip Roth edition:
Novels and Stories 1959–1962
Novels 1967–1972
Novels 1973–1977
Zuckerman Bound: A Trilogy and Epilogue 1979–1985
Novels 1993–1995

Copyright 1995–2007 Literary Classics of the United States, Inc.
Contact Us | Privacy and Security