Poverty Holidays Gift #9: Philip Roth's "The Counterlife"

Back in July, a PDXWD reviewer said of this novel:

"What was particularly impressive to this reader was the degree to which the shifts in reality and reflections-upon-writing in The Counterlife did not lessen the effects of the novel's realism. Roth's characters are vivid, their situations specific. He allows them to speak: when upset, his characters sometimes speak for pages. He allows them equality: the characters are intelligent, and when arguing, characters on opposing sides of arguments--whether those arguments are political or emotional--each make compelling points. He allows them honesty: his characters are frank about sex, about their most conflicted feelings, about the things they have done and why they have done them. And in this novel, he allows them the particular reflectivity built into a novel that features a novelist as the narrator: they discuss, quite naturally, the degree to which perhaps the narrator and main character, Nathan Zuckerman, likes to get himself into arguments and conflicts primarily because he thinks they will make for good source material for his fiction writing. Zuckerman responds to these thoughts. The novel proceeds."

It is available kind of close to our city.