Synopses & Reviews
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 half-resigned. The book's action consists of conversations--mainly the lovers talking to each other before and after making love.
"A fiendishly clever piece of work...an amazing feat.... He's invented the purest speech, the most convincing cadences, of any American novelist."--Hudson Review
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 the Author
In the 1990s Philip Roth won Americas four major literary
awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle
Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for
Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbaths
Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for
American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book
Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist
(1998); in the same year he received the National
Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the
National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife
(1986) and the National Book Award for his first book,
Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human
Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos
of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received
his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britains W. H.
Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he
received the highest award of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six
years “for the entire work of the recipient.” In 2005 The
Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians
Award for “the outstanding historical novel on an
American theme for 20032004.” In 2007 Roth received the
PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman.