Deception

"With the lover everyday life recedes," Roth writesand exhibiting all his skill as a brilliant observer of human passion, he presents inDeceptionthe tightly enclosed world of adulterous intimacy with a directness that has no equal in American fiction. At the center ofDeceptionare 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 conversationmainly the lovers talking to each other before and after making love. That dialoguesharp, 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.

In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for <b>Patrimony</b> (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for <b>Operation Shylock</b> (1993), the National Book Award for <b>Sabbath's Theater</b> (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for <b>American Pastoral</b> (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for <b>I Married a Communist</b> (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 <b>The Counterlife</b> (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, <b>Goodbye, Columbus</b> (1959). In 2000 he published <b>The Human Stain</b>, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological eth