“Deception” published by Leonardo in 1991, Einaudi in 2006, and Mondadori in 2015 is no small feat.

Here’s a book or booklet (since it consists of about a hundred and fifty pages) “Deception” from 1990 that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone (but also not, meaning I would recommend it to everyone) except to a pair of lovers (since it deals with them) who might see themselves reflected in it and draw or avoid something in their conversations or behaviors before and after making love well or poorly.

I struggled to reach the end and found it quite tedious despite being intelligently written (bringing us back to recurring themes in Philip Roth like sex, marital crisis, without neglecting the condition of Jews in Western society, betrayal, cancer, womanizing, psychoanalysis, the widespread antisemitism among the English) and built on sentences exchanged before (it seems even during, but I don't remember well, as many months have passed since its somber reading) and after clandestine encounters by a couple of people who have few interests in common except sex and the desire to remain distant from each other (at least that’s how it appeared to me in the end).

There is something autobiographical (besides the protagonist writer's name, which is Philip), like when he mentions his readings which can range from James Joyce to Fëdor Dostoevskij to Gustave Flaubert or when he writes: “Scrupulousness became a cage of itself, the refusal to contaminate with the experience of real life, something that almost had the effect of strangling his art…

…All that shyness, disguised as <<discretion>>, in facing the contradictions and pagan impulses of a man. The terror of desecration and the fear of shame. As if purity was at the heart of a writer's nature. Heaven help such a writer!” and right after: “At the heart of a writer's nature is whimsy. Curiosity, fixations, isolation, poison, fetishism, austerity, lightness, perplexity, infantilism, etc. The nose in the seam of a piece of intimate clothing: that's the nature of the writer. Impurity.”, in short, not purity, but rather fixations, perplexities, infantilism, curiosity, it seems that to become a writer, one must lose scruples.

Without revealing too much, at a certain point, what transforms the plot of the clandestine couple into an engaging twist happens: the protagonist’s wife finds the manuscript on which all the dialogues in the book are noted, and here comes the accusation of betrayal… but the rest, if you’re really interested, you’ll have to read for yourself.

I agree with the writer of a blog on this novel ”The Thin Line between Reality and Fiction”, where the register of the “story” remains high, as befits the considerable cultural level of Philip Roth’s characters.

Never a flaw in the dialogues, never any sloppiness or misplaced words.

Everything is so clean and perfect that it appears unreal.

This seems to be the strength, and sometimes the limit, of the great American novelist: such a clear writing style becomes a delight for some readers, but if exacerbated (as sometimes happens in these pages), it risks resembling an almost onanistic exercise of style… and that's it.

n.b. not everything written here (as in my other pieces) is solely my own…

p.s. I read this very beautiful article by Annalena Benini in Il Foglio https://www.ilfoglio.it/articoli/2015/02/15/news/storia-damore-e-disamore-80945/ after writing my little review, in which she shares a biographical part about Philip Roth and his couple experiences, also mentioning “Deception” and it let me see PR in a different light, not exactly commendable but anyway, no one is perfect, read for yourselves…

p.s.2 later, I read on cosmopolitan.com regarding this novel that “The final deception is the revelation that, as in any relationship, the story changes depending on how we tell it to ourselves.”, well, nothing truer, and anyone who has been betrayed or has betrayed knows…

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