The Counterlife

"The Counterlife provides several alternative perspectives. The novel’s conflicting points of view take you out of your comfort zone, to use the cliché. As I developed in my account of Roth, there is a counterlife to the public Phillip Roth, and it’s often driven by anger. Roth wrote in The Counterlife, “[p]eople are unjust to anger, it can be enlivening and a lot of fun.” But Roth was not that happy and it’s very difficult to find a happy character in his work. Unhappiness is what compels his characters to act, to write, to love, to think and to change. I subtitle my account The Counterlife because it goes beyond the glossy image of Roth presented in Vanity Fair and the happy home images in Architectural Digest . That’s only half his story. I wanted to tell the other part. Roth created a moat around himself, a self-protective wall. I wasn’t going to dismantle the wall, but I wanted to peek over it. This is where archives come in, interviewing people, and thinking about how and why he wrote in his special way."