Roth's The Counterlife and the Negotiation of Reality and Fiction

In her article "Roth's The Counterlife and the Negotiation of Reality and Fiction" Pia Masiero analyzes some aspects of the readers' negotiations of Phillip Roth's 1986 novel. Masiero shows how Roth in the novel's first chapter "Basel" anatomizes what follows and provides the rules of pertinence which guide the text and the keys to interpret its meaning. Masiero argues that the effects of perspec- tive created by the employment of third-person narration and contra-punctual simultaneous narratives prepare readers to the metafictional choices they encounter in the final chapters of the book. With her analysis, Masiero posits that the novel turns out to be a journey in Nathan Zuckerman's writerly mind and a window on how our own minds work.