Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Noted and reviled Jewish writer Nathan Zuckerman returns with a cast of familiar Roth types, but the thorny style and the technical complexities introduce a new stage in Roth's career. (N 15 86 Upfront)

Library Journal
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One of Roth's "Zuckerman" books, The Counterlife follows protagonist Nathan Zuckerman from New York to Israel to London. "Along the way, monologues, eulogies, letters, interviews, and conversations ponder Judaism and Zionism, the nature of personality, the competing claims of imagination and life, and sex" (LJ 2/15/87). (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

For the latest installment in his autobiographical series (collected in Zuckerman Bound , LJ 7/85), Roth has written a puzzle, but one with passion and purpose. Its mysteries, more logical than magical, concern whether either Zuckerman brother, Nathan the novelist or Henry the dentist, has suffered impotence from drugs prescribed for a heart condition and has subsequently died during a bypass operation. Each of the book's five chapters, ranging from New York to Israel to London and environs, is contradicted by what follows, until the end reminds us forcefully that The Counterlife is, like any novel, neither true nor false but counterfactual. Along the way, monologues, eulogies, letters, interviews, and conversations ponder Judaism and Zionism, the nature of personality, the competing claims of imagination and life, and (Roth being Roth) sex. Recommended. Hugh M. Crane, Brockton P.L., Mass. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Choice
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

Philip Roth's latest novel is simultaneously his most experimental and, paradoxically, quite familiar to his regular readers in subject matter. The primary characters, the novelist Nathan Zuckerman and his dentist brother Henry, have appeared often in Roth's recent fiction. The themes, too, grow naturally out of such earlier works as My Life As a Man (CH, Oct '74) or Zuckerman Bound (1985). Here again are Roth's recurrent preoccupations: the plight of the Jewish-American male, the nature of sexual obsession, and above all the process of transmuting experience into fiction. Never before has Roth dealt in so daring and compelling a manner with the relationship between life and art. The novel is both experimental and accessible in that it presents a series of carefully articulated, apparently contradictory, possibilities, which serve to illuminate rather than undercut one another. For example, Henry Zuckerman dies during heart surgery in the first section. In the second, he has made a new life in Israel, where Nathan visits him. Later still, it is Henry who attends the funeral of Nathan, who has died of the same surgical procedure. This constant rearranging of the possibilities of life and fiction results in one of Roth's most polished works. His concerns appear to remain familiar, but he continues to test the limits of his art. Recommended for college and university libraries.-B.H. Leeds, Central Connecticut State University

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Much of the last two decades' metafictional nattering is made to look like so much sandbox-play by Roth's new novel; if the technique of ostensibly real characters imagining they're in books (and vice-versa) has a fatal flaw, it's that neither character nor book usually tackles the unbearable alibis, transgressions, and needs--and the punishingly naked absurdity--that both art and life seem to demand. But that's what Roth, in his most virtuoso effort yet, has done here. Disenfranchisement, re-creation, and the severe guilt of independence are the I-beams of Roth's Zuckerman books--of which this is one--but never has the ceiling vaulted so high, the aim been so nervy. The earlier books were the deathbeds of novelist Zuckerman's father and mother, and it's now the turn of Nathan's dentist brother Henry to die. He does so semi-electively: rendered impotent by heart medication, he goes through with a multiple bypass that fails fatally. Yet the book's very next section, ""Judea,"" finds Henry not dead but in Israel, on the West Bank, in thrall to a right-wing Jewish Kahane-type--and Nathan leaving his own peaceful London writer's existence to try to walk some sense into his kid brother, to get him to return home to his family. How did Henry dead turn into Henry the irrendentist? The same way, it turns out, that it's actually Nathan--in the section called ""Gloucestershire""--who's died to restore his potency. Henry's story, then, is one that Nathan wrote; and Nathan's story may be the book we're reading, subject to disputes and interruptions and resentments from those closest to him, lives he has cannibalized for the art-pot. Whether Henry's, Nathan's, or Nathan's new Gentile British wife's, it isn't clear until the end which story is true, which made up--but each section (including an El Al hijacking Nathan is unwilling party to) faces another like a mirror, bringing characters back to themselves, real or not. The presiding theme, never more naked, is Jewishness, complete with Talmudic feints, discontinuous pleating (a lesson learned, one senses, from Roth's admiration for Central European fiction, Kundera and the like)--allowing Roth to write a book of intellectual argument and atavistic rejoinder that someone like Saul Bellow has been lately trying to write, without success. The Israel sections alone are brilliant reportage; in tangled context--of fictional projection, an assuaging of guilt by secular Nathan--they suggest a kind of forced and frightened choral laughter. Certainly Roth's most complex, ambitious work--and one of his best. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal
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Henry Zuckerman, left impotent by his blood pressure medicine, dies on the operating table in a desperate attempt to regain his virility. Brother Nathan, confessional novelist and longtime Roth alter ego, composes an elegy that he finds himself unable to deliver. Still, he's intrigued by what he's written, which morphs into some other versions of his and Henry's life. In some, Nathan dies and Henry lives. In others, Nathan finds himself wooing or wed to Henry's mistress. These various iterations of their lives eventually evolve into some metafictional sleight of hand. Story aside, and there is surprising little here, the book's real subjects are Jewish identity and the boundary between fiction and autobiography. Both topics are explored at great length, leaving the work surprisingly and disappointingly static. George Guidall's stately tones don't speed things along much either. Libraries where the Zuckerman books are popular will want this, of course, though reading it as a standalone is much like coming into a conversation halfway through and never quite catching up. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.