The book's action consists of conversation - mainly the lovers talking to each other before and after making love
"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 30s, she is already nervously half-resigned.
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 audiobook, and all there needs to be.
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction-often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey-is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity.
