Philip Roth’s novel “The Counterlife” may be his farthest jump into the world of post-modernism. His books always contain winks toward meta-writing (the much-beloved American Pastoral, remember, is 9/10ths not the actual story but what might have been the story) but this time we see Roth’s thesis presented in four bold colors with varying permutations connecting them. The premise, essentially, is what if I zigged instead of zagged? This is part of being human – forever wondering what life would be like if you chose differently at important crossroads. The decision here (since it is Philip Roth, after all) has to do with his cock. A mild heart condition is treated with medication that leaves him impotent. The solution is simple surgery, but there is always a risk. Leave it alone or adapt? The surgery is a success or does it kill you? Does the success of the surgery lead you back to a normal life, or send you wildly off the deep end sending you to live with dementedly normal British woman in a small village or (in the case of your brother) to join a band of extremists on a West Bank settlement? Oh, that’s the other big either/or — is the story about you or about your brother? And if it is about your brother, will he mind or will he take vengeance and steal all your unpublished pages after your heart surgery goes awry and kills you? (Leading us to believe that everything we’ve read so far, and the upcoming chapter, isn’t in fact the new Philip Roth book, but in fact everything left out of the new Philip Roth book.)
It’s one of those and it ends, as these things must, with the characters confronting the author. Or do they just confront the lead character, who happens to be an author who writes about his brother and his cock and his brother’s cock? Woah. I’m exhausted.
Luckily, in the midst of all this heavyness and lit theory, there are some fantastic scenes — best being an ill-fated El Al hijacking by a crazed reverse-Zionist (shades of Operation Shylock) who feels the best way to honor the Holocaust is to pretend it never happened.
