BORDERS BOOK REVIEW: Deception by Philip Roth
13 02 2008Hashani Samaraweera | hashani_87@hotmail.com
the ridge transmedia
A NUSSU Publication
Picture credit: http://www.amazon.com
“Too much. Why do you?”
Raw and filled with confusing conversations, Philip Roth’s novel is a work of pure dialogue between two adulterous lovers. One of them is a Jewish-American writer named Philip while the other is an unnamed English woman in a marriage which is falling apart. The novel is all about the conversations between the two, mainly the woman talking about her husband’s adulterous relationship, while the man listens.
The dialogue oscillates from logical to senseless as the subject of the lovers’ conversations changes. It’s sometimes difficult to keep track of what and who they are referring to in their conversations. The topics range from Israel, Jews, misogyny, mothers, disintegrated marriages and so on. New subjects spring up spontaneously in the chapters about random things “utterly without meaning”, and most of their conversations do not even reach a logical conclusion as to how it is connected to the supposed lovers.
Roth blends past happenings and the present into the dialog that takes place throughout the novel, as conversations between Philip and his ex-lovers also emerge in between some chapters. Later on you realize that the two lovers have actually known each other for 10 years. The woman was the man’s student and he used to be a professor who seduced his students to sleep with him. This will leave the reader to wonder whether the relationship the two lovers are having does have some meaning or whether it’s utterly baseless and just in place for their own selfish desires.
But the real twist which creates more confusion comes when Philip’s wife discovers his notebook in which he writes the conversations the reader has been reading. When confronted by her he says that all the “intimate” conversations were a figment of his imagination – “the story of an imagination in love” and the reader is left to question whether he was deceived into a non-existent relationship that took place just to escape marriage. However, the last chapter of the novel takes a sudden turn into a more believable warm relationship the lovers might have had, in their last conversation. Philip’s adulterous lover seems to be real after all, at a point where Philip’s imaginary life and real life collided, deep within the room where the lovers met. But the reader might wonder if Roth himself is deceiving the reader into believing it.
To me, it is a somewhat unrefined novel, which revolves around a rather confusing relationship between two characters that you can’t really identify with, and it was difficult to grasp a solid plot within the characters dialogues. Roth’s style of stretching the limits of dialog does depict a sense of immediacy and vitality to his characters, but I did not find the technique very appealing. However, in the midst of the theme of deception in the novel – deceiving one’s spouse, deceiving one’s self – Roth explores some serious issues such as anti-Semitism and marriage life through the couple’s bantering.
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