THE COUNTERLIFE. I also read The Counterlife on my vacation–finished it on the plane from Heathrow to the airport that should still be named Idlewild. Philip Roth is a great novelist, and I strongly recommend this book. Especially to bloggers who are interested in Israel, and that seems to cover a lot of us, from Unqualified Offerings to the YalePundits. The Counterlife suffers from a degree of fatalism. That may sound odd if you know the strange, overlapping nature of the plot (which I won’t reveal, but it jumps off the rails a few times in some really well-done metafictional ways). What I mean is that the narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, sometimes seems to have an unrealistic view of the world as divided into the good people and the rest of us. (As with the book reviewed below, I have no clue to what extent the narrator’s view is shared by his author.) For the good people, even the hardships of life are softened by the comforting knowledge that they are good and decent. For the rest of us, however much we might want to be good and decent, our desires and corruption make that decency unavailable to us. It’s a metaphorically Calvinist view of the world, and Roth presents it with nuance and compassion; but I hate it. I am probably oversensitive to this particular kind of fatalism because I used to believe it very strongly. It was one way of explaining the strong sense of wrongness and alienation that I’ve felt pretty much all my life; it allowed me to build a livable identity on that alienation, accepting “wrongness” but not accepting the possibility of redemption. If you accept the possibility of redemption, you have to change. So throughout The Counterlife I found myself wincing as turns of phrase, both implicit and explicit, declared that change was impossible, that a life begun in alienation and (what I think Heidegger called?) thrown-ness must remain there, that some people are Good and others are Not.