The Counterlife, according to its jacket copy, is “a novel unlike any that Philip Roth has written before.”[1] The book reads “like a triumph” to William Gass in The New York Times Book Review; the author is “a comic genius,” writes Martin Amis in The Atlantic. Richard Locke’s Wall Street Journal article claims Roth has “quite transcended himself”; interviews with the author are spilling out of the pages of Vanity Fair, Elle, and the galleys of a new essay collection to be entitled Reading Philip Roth; the publisher has pronounced the book “a bestseller before publication date.” Fanfare, limelight, jubilee—despite promises that The Counterlife is not only new but improved, even unprecedented, all the signals from publicity headquarters look comfortably like those of every previous launch since Portnoy’s Complaint.

The new novel itself has plenty of familiar components. Roth’s humor and intelligence, and his gift for imitating speech rhythms, are in evidence. So, inevitably, is Nathan Zuckerman, the famous Jewish writer of a book similar to Portnoy but who is not, we have been told sternly again and again, to be confused with Philip Roth. And there is Henry, Nathan’s dentist brother in New Jersey, and various relatives who had appeared in The Ghost Writer (1979), Zuckerman Unbound (1981), and The Anatomy Lesson (1983), and who then went into reruns with the publication in 1985 of all three novels together with an epilogue, The Prague Orgy, in a volume