Deception
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A dazzling novel about a man and woman married to other people—and the riveting conversations that take place before and after they make love—from the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral.
"This swift, elegant, disturbing novel...stands at the extreme of contemporary fiction." —The New York Times Book Review
With the lover everyday life recedes," Roth writes—and exhibiting all his skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, he presents in Deception the tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction. At the center of Deception are two adulterers in their hiding place. He is a middle-aged American writer named Philip, living in London, and she is an articulate, intelligent, well-educated Englishwoman compromised by a humiliating marriage to which, in her thirties, she is already nervously half-resigned. The book's action consists of conversation—mainly the lovers talking to each other before and after making love. That dialogue—sharp, rich, playful, inquiring, "moving," as Hermione Lee writes, "on a scale of pain from furious bafflement to stoic gaiety"—is nearly all there is to this book, and all there needs to be.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Written entirely in unascribed dialogue (which provides the challenge of identifying the speakers), this newest novel by the NBCC Award-winning author is a clever comedy of manners that segues--as is the author's wont--into a disquisition on the distinction between literature and life. Most of the conversations are articulate, erotic pillow talk between adulterous lovers: an American writer living in London and his English mistress. She complains about the complications of her domestic life. He mainly listens: ``I'm an ecouteur--an audiophiliac. I'm a talk fetishist.'' The identification with Roth himself is clear; the male speaker refers to ``Zuckerman, my character.'' He also records conversations with other women, his former lovers. Two of them are emigrees from Eastern Europe; like the male speaker/Roth, they are outsiders in English society, where he is very conscious of British anti-Semitism. But the book is more complex than the conversational format suggests. Roth is up to his old tricks; the title has a dual meaning. In a conversation between the male character/Roth and his ``wife,'' he insists that these dialogues are purely imaginary, notes for a novel in progress. Yes, but then another conversation suggests otherwise. Who is being deceived here? It's impossible to say. First serial to Esquire.
