The Pulitzer Prize-winning internationally acclaimed author of American Pastoral delivers a fierce tragedy of sexual need and blindness. A fiction-within-a-fiction a labyrinthine edifice of funny mournful and harrowing meditations on the fatal impasse between a man and a woman My Life as a Man is Roths most blistering novel. At its heart lies the marriage of Peter and Maureen Tarnopol a gifted young writer and the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead is his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and shored up by moral blackmail but it is so perversely durable that long after Maureens death Peter is still trying--and failing--to write his way free of it. Out of desperate inventions and cauterizing truths acts of weakness tenderheartedness and shocking cruelty Philip Roth creates a work worthy of Strindberg.
