Philip Roth -- Countertexts, Counterlives

"I think of my life as one long speech that I've been listening to ... how to think, how not to think; how to behave, how not to behave; ... the book of my life is a book of voices," reflects Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth's alter ego, in I Married a Communist. Looking at Roth's writing life as a "book of voices," the author listens in on the conversations that this prominent American novelist has conducted with himself and his times over forty years and twenty-four books. She finds that while Roth frequently shifts perspectives, he repeatedly returns to interrelated questions of cultural history, literary history, and, especially, selfhood. Arguing that Roth's method of composition, like his conception of self, is fundamentally dialogical, she follows the writer from his depictions of embodied, ethnically determined selves to his exploration of indeterminate selves revealed in the public spaces of confession and historical trauma. In addition to offering informed readings of Roth's work, she provides new insights from the virtually untapped archives of the Philip Roth Collection at the Library of Congress.