At first the novel seems like a peep-show into an adulterous affair. She is married with a child, a job, a nanny, and a husband who parades his mistress in her face. She is severely conflicted about everything and is contemplating divorce. He is suffering the alienation of an American in England. This talk is the subject matter of the book. Occasionally, they stray into other pet Roth subjects like fathers, mothers, misogyny, his work, and the Jews.
But then the talk shifts to other female voices: a jet-setting Czech prostitute who wants Roth to help her write a novel; a 33-year old Polish woman with a child who also wants him to help her write; an English woman from his past in New York who is suffering from cancer; his wife who accidentally discovers his notebook with all these “conversations.” Roth defends his notebook, saying that all the women recorded within are fictional characters. He sums it up as, “But then I am not the only man who thinks about imaginary women while in the bedroom with the woman he regularly sleeps with. There may even be women who behave just as impurely in their bedrooms with the men they regularly sleep with. The difference is that what I impurely imagine, I am impelled to develop and write down. In my imagination I am unfaithful to everybody, by the way, not just to you.”
During these post-coital periods of euphoria and unburdening, he postulates about adultery and the life of a writer with pearls of wisdom such as:1) “One of the unfair things about adultery, when you compare the lover to the spouse, the lover is never seen in those awful dreary circumstances, arguing about the vegetables, or burning toast, or forgetting to ring up for something, or putting upon someone or being put upon. All that stuff, I think, people deliberately keep out of affairs.”2) “By the time a novelist worth his salt is thirty-six, he’s no longer translating experience into a fable-he’s imposing his fable onto experience.”3) When asked where he stands : “Yes, somewhere between desire and disillusionment on the long plummet to death.”4) When asked why he likes East Europeans (in real life Roth was helping dissident Eastern Block writers at the time) he says: “Displaced persons have things to tell me. I’m interested in suffering.” One wonders whether that is true of his lovers too.5) On the role of the writer: “The nose in the seam of the undergarment-that’s the writer’s nature. Impurity.”6) “But discretion is, unfortunately, not for e.”
They meet regularly site for sex and talk, in his studio
In fact, Roth claims he is writing Zuckerman’s biography, the fictional writer having died at age 44 after writing only 4 novels-we know that Roth changed his mind on Zuckerman later, for this alter-ego rose from the dead to write many more novels.
Other Roth creations flit in and out of the narrative: writers Lonoff and Zuckerman, for instance
So what is this novel all about, then? First of all, it is Roth further exploring the prime subject in all of his books: himself. Second, it covers a period in his life when he was feeling displaced and diminished as an expatriate and took refuge in adultery. Third, it shows his passion for digging up people’s stories and fictionalizing them. And finally he was trying out a new form – dialogue with no attributions, just voices plumbing into human nature and unearthing disturbing truths. I don’t think he had much consideration for the reader – if you are able to follow who is saying what to whom and when, then well and good, if not… put it down to another deception on the part of the author.