David Sexton

Shooting More Than His Mouth Off

The Counterlife

By

Jonathan Cape 336pp £10.95 order from our bookshop

Philip Roth notoriously writes books about Philip Roth under another name. For the last five it has been the same name: Nathan Zuckerman. In an interview he defended the practice ingeniously:

Think of the ventriloquist. He speaks so that his voice appears to proceed from someone at a distance from himself. But if he weren’t in your line of vision you’d get no pleasure from his art at all.

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