Deception is a 1990

1990 in literature

The year 1990 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*J. K. Rowling gets the idea for Harry Potter while on a train ride from Manchester to London. She says "I was staring out the window, and the idea for Harry just came. He appeared in my mind's eye, very fully formed...

 novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 by Philip Roth

Philip Roth

Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award...

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Narrator

The novel marks the first time Roth uses his own name as the name of the main protagonist within a fictional work; he had previously used himself as a main character in a work of non-fiction

Non-fiction

Non-fiction is the form of any narrative, account, or other communicative work whose assertions and descriptions are understood to be fact...

 - The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography

The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography is a book by Philip Roth that traces his life from his childhood in Newark, New Jersey to becoming a successful, widely respected novelist...

, and would do so again in the memoir Patrimony. "Roth" would also be narrator of the novels Operation Shylock and The Plot Against America.

Summary

At the center of the book are conversations between a married American named Philip, living in London, and a married Englishwoman—trapped with a small child in a loveless upper-middle-class household. The lives of both characters are gradually revealed as they talk before and after making love.

Reception

Writing in the New York Times Book Review, the writer and critic Fay Weldon called the novel, "extraordinary, elegant, disturbing," adding that she had found it, "exhilarating." She continues:

"Mr. Roth throws down a gauntlet. He is very brave; this literary navel-gazing is a risky occupation. Is this novel a portrait of Mr. Roth or non-Roth in hateful literary London, having it off with the wives of his friends? What conceit, to think we're interested. Yet he gets away with it even as he angers us. How skillful this lover, he who started out as the grubby, impetuous Portnoy, has become. How delicately within this 'text without exposition et cetera' he delineates lines of plot, character, event, desire. How he seduces the reluctant, soothes the aggravated."

Library of America

Deception is included in the fifth volume of Philip Roth's collected works Novels and Other Narratives 1986–1991, published by the Library of America

Library of America

The Library of America is a nonprofit publisher of classic American literature.- Overview and history :Founded in 1979 with seed money from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, the LoA has published over 200 volumes by a wide range of authors from Mark Twain to Philip...

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