Preview of The Counterlife Summary:

The main theme of The Counterlife is expressed by its title. As he did to a lesser extent in My Life as a Man (1974), where he first introduced the character of Nathan Zuckerman as the novelist Peter Tarnopol's alter ego, Roth here plays with alternative versions of a person's life, or fate. Thus, in the first section, Nathan's brother Henry undergoes surgery for a serious heart condition and dies, but in the next section he is alive and recovered from the surgery and living in Israel. In a still later section, not Henry, but Nathan, has the heart condition and dies, leaving his brother and his lover, Maria, to discover the drafts of the novel he is writing about them, most of which the reader has already read as the foregoing chapters. Henry's and Maria's comments, as well as the eulogy recited at Nathan's funeral, provide important insights...