The Counterlife

Of course, it's not new.

Philip Roth did it brilliantly in The Counterlife and Operation Shylock and Marcel Proust.

It's nothing but autofiction.

You know, go all the way back to Rousseau, going back to that first Confessions, that autobiography, which may also be largely made up or at least partly made up.

novel was

that? That novel was Counterlife.

which was the novel before Operation Shylock, which as I was engaging with the literature of the doppelganger, I kept reading that I really had to read Operation Shylock, which I couldn't do because I had sworn that I would never again read another novel by Philip Roth.

But finally I broke down because it was on so many lists of the best doppelganger novels of all time.

Is that the Rothian idea of trying to attach a local or personal narrative to a much bigger narrative?

That is certainly true, but also his much more structurally convoluted novels like The Counterlife where something happens and then it turns out that that didn't happen at all and something else entirely happened and then we go a step further and you're in a new reality and everything's unfolding through the last thing in a different way.

So there's that.

And then also that, I mean, what I was really thinking about when I decided to be risk-taking was an earlier novel by Rachel Bogost, which is the first of the Nathan Zuckerman novels, where he just decided to introduce this character, you know, that Zuckerman is hitting on because it's Roth.

No, he's saying it's Anne Frank.

And then I

went to The Counterlife and you see Roth as this kind of

old grandfather of American literature now.