Deception (Vintage International) - Softcover

Roth, Philip

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679752943 ISBN 13: 9780679752943

Publisher: Vintage, 1997

Synopsis

A dazzling novel about a man and woman married to other people--and the riveting conversations that take place before and after they make love--from the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning author of American Pastoral.

"This swift, elegant, disturbing novel...stands at the extreme of contemporary fiction." --The New York Times Book Review

With the lover everyday life recedes," Roth writes--and exhibiting all his skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, he presents in Deception the tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction. At the center of Deception are two adulterers in their hiding place. He is a middle-aged American writer named Philip, living in London, and she is an articulate, intelligent, well-educated Englishwoman compromised by a humiliating marriage to which, in her thirties, she is already nervously half-resigned. The book's action consists of conversation--mainly the lovers talking to each other before and after making love. That dialogue--sharp, rich, playful, inquiring, "moving," as Hermione Lee writes, "on a scale of pain from furious bafflement to stoic gaiety"--is nearly all there is to this book, and all there needs to be.

About this title

About the Author

PHILIP ROTH won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians' Prize for "the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004." Roth received PEN's two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. He died in 2018.

From the Back Cover

"With the lover everyday life recedes," Roth writes--and exhibiting all his skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, he presents in Deception the tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction. At the center of Deception are two adulterers in their hiding place. He is a middle-aged American writer named Philip, living in London, and she is an articulate, intelligent, well-educated Englishwoman compromised by a humiliating marriage to which, in her thirties, she is already nervously half-resigned. The book's action consists of conversation--mainly the lovers talking to each other before and after making love. That dialogue--sharp, rich, playful, inquiring, "moving," as Hermione Lee writes, "on a scale of pain from furious bafflement to stoic gaiety"--is nearly all there is to this book, and all there needs to be.

From the Inside Flap

he lover everyday life recedes," Roth writes and exhibiting all his skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, he presents in Deception the tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction. At the center of Deception are two adulterers in their hiding place. He is a middle-aged American writer named Philip, living in London, and she is an articulate, intelligent, well-educated Englishwoman compromised by a humiliating marriage to which, in her thirties, she is already nervously half-resigned. The book's action consists of conversation mainly the lovers talking to each other before and after making love. That dialogue sharp, rich, playful, inquiring, "moving," as Hermione Lee writes, "on a scale of pain from furious bafflement to stoic gaiety" is nearly all there is to this book, and all there needs to be.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679752943
• ISBN 13: 9780679752943
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208