Description
Book SynopsisReturning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman - incontinent and impotent - comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Walking the streets he quickly makes several connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. In a rash moment, he offers to swap homes with a young couple. And from the moment he meets them, Zuckerman wants to exchange his solitude for the erotic allure of the young woman Jamie, who draws him back to all that he thought he had left behind: intimacy, and the play of heart and body.
Suddenly involved, as he never wanted or intended to be involved again, with love, mourning, desire and animosity, Zuckerman plays out an interior drama of vivid and poignant possibilities.
Trade ReviewThere are few writers who write with such power of the loss of powers * Times Literary Supplement *
If its subject embraces mortality, its sentences ring with vitality, and Roth reminds us why "the transforming exigencies of prose fiction" still matter even as the light begins to die * Mail on Sunday *
Taken together the Zuckermam novels read as both a noisy New Jersey Kaddish for 50 years of American History and an extraordinary contemporary "Song of Myself" * New Statesman *
At his best, Philip Roth constructs his novels from huge blocks of material, to produce an effect that is overpowering * Observer *
Here is a noble revelation of the curel vulnerability of the body we live in without choice * Times Literary Supplement *
