Probably Roth's best book. Funny, perceptive and well-written. ( )

A book like a play, set in five acts, each containing a different mix of the same ingredients: brotherly love/hate, heartfailure, impotency, death, love, what does it mean to be a jew. Often he punctures the thin membrane between the fictious reality of the book - actually several confliction versions- and the real world of the living writer. It's a trick I usually don't like, but Roth pulls it of: the stoy flows naturally between the multiple fictious worlds of the book and reality. Pivotal sentence of the book for me: 'The treacherous imagination is everybody's maker - we are all the invention of each other, everybody a conjuration conjuring up everyone else. We are all each other's authors.' I was emotionally very moved by this book ,especially when Roth writes about the love and hate between the Brothers Henry and Nathan. As for other themes the book is also very concerned with religious extremism and hatred, especially the jewish variant (it contains a quite balanced description of a meir kahane lookalike). ( )

Roth is at least for me at his ingenious best in this one. The Counterlife starts off with Nathan Zuckerman's brother Henry (a dentist in Tampa) contemplating whether or not to have a heart operation. His medication allows him to live a symptom free existence for the forseeable future--it only has one drawback--it has left him completely impotent and it threatens the secret affair he is having with his dental assistant. From this starting point Roth through his narrator Nathan contemplates and develops through a handful of chapters several different alternative endings--working through in his trademark style the domestic to and fro antagonisms between love and family and sexual attraction outside of family, between nation and race, ideology and cultural and religious heritage bringing in and out of focus first one brother and then the other and interchanging their circumstances so that at first it is Henry who suffers and dies on the operating table, then becomiing an armed militant for a right wing would be Jewish ideologue in occupied territory on the West Bank ready to defend Zionism at any and all cost then only to find later on that Nathan is actually the one suffering the debility--having concocted the selfsame story up to that point using his brother as a foil for his own affairs--only to die as his brother has supposedly done in the first chapters of his manuscript on the same operating table and only to have the suspicious Henry uncover this deception afterwards as he ransacks the recently deceased Nathan's studio apartment. Roth shifts the circumstances back and forth between the brothers and their lovers--maybe not so coherently described here (poor reviewer that I am) however Roth is a fluid writer and a compelling thinker who dots his i's and crosses his t's. He knows how to make things work and work well. He has the ability to look into the minds and aspirations of his characters and make them real. He may be as good a dialogue writer as there is in the English language novel of today. One should not disregard also his very subtle sense of humor. Very highly recommended by the way. ( )

The story is covered from several points of view with alternate realities as interpreted by an author. It really gets to the heart of an artist's interpretation of the world. I found this to be a good but not great novel. It is an interesting concept for a story that gets bogged down in overly pedantic self-analysis. Overall, this is a good but not great book that could have been spectacular. ( )

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