I Know I Should Like Philip Roth

I'm on page 182 of "The Counterlife" and I can't wait to be done. 324 pages total. If I read just 50 pages a day, I can be done by Saturday. And since I've started skimming some of the longer dialogue exchanges, that should be very doable.

And then I won't have to read another Philip Roth novel for another year. That's my deal with myself.

I somehow avoided Roth until recently. When the New York Times published its list of "the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years" a few years ago and Roth's books were so prominently featured I decided I needed to fill in this gap. I got "American Pastoral" and found myself losing interest after just 20 to 30 pages. OK, so I read that this is part of a long series involving a character named Zuckerman. So I decided I should work up to this book. The idea of seven or eight books in a series didn't scare me off.

But I took a break first. Reread "Beloved" and the first two of Updike's Rabbit books to prove to myself I wasn't completely unable to enjoy and appreciate what the late 20th century had to offer.

Then I read "The Ghost Writer." Liked it. I grew up across the Kill Van Kull from Newark so felt a certain kinship with the subject matter, even if the Newark Roth depicts was long gone by the time I came along. But it felt like work. However, by the end of the book I'd warmed to him and raved to my husband that it was true that Roth has been gypped of the Nobel Prize, that there's no one who can deliver period dialogue like him, etc. etc.

Then I jumpted right into "Zuckerman Unbound" and "The Anatomy Lesson." I plowed right through. I wallowed. I OD'd. I waited a long time to turn to "The Prague Orgy."

The next two -- "The Counterlife" and "American Pastoral" -- sat unblinking and accusatory on my bedside for almost two years. I don't know what made me take up Roth again now but it is torture. And yet I can't allow myself to stop.

It doesn't make sense. I've given in before. Gave up on Salman Rushdie nearly as soon as I started, could barely hold "The Alchemist" in my hand, and ended up gritting my teeth through the second half of Pamuk's "Snow" (even though I went on to greatly enjoy others of his books).

I usually have great staying power with books and series. I pretended to have (or gave myself a psychosomatic case of?) the flu to finish "Crime and Punishment" a few years ago. I cheerfully whistled my way through a course in Victorian literature in which I digested a Dickens or Eliot orAusten novel every week. I will press a copy of "Absalom! Absalom!" in the hands of any unsuspecting teenager who expresses even a mild interest in southern writers.

Several years ago I went to a dinner party where one of the guests was a soon-t0-be-famous medium. My father had died a few years before and I corralled my cynicism long enough to talk to the medium. He first described to me a teal blue tailored coat I had as a child that my father had particularly liked. Then he looked me straight in the eye and said, "Your father wants you to know -- all the books are where he is. You don't need to rush through them."

There was nothing more convincing I could have heard. But of course I couldn't show that.

"Great," I quipped. "I can wait for eternity to read Proust."

And I've kept to that. I've read Zola and Flaubert but I've not experienced the float of memories from the taste of the madeleine myself. I'm waiting.

But I don't think I want to share eternity with Philip Roth. In fact, I want to finish with him before I'm 50.