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Reading Roth/Reading Ourselves: Looking Back, Victoria Aarons

English Faculty Research

Roth thus presents his characters as figures bearing the very seductive possibility of a "multitude of realities." Disenchanted with a worn-out, dampened, banal, and diminished life, one can slip into another, "an exchange of existences," as the wily Zuckerman says. But, in changing those distasteful and objectionable aspects of one's existence, one would do well to caution against the intemperate, impulsive desire, the head-long rush to "change everything," as Zuckerman chastises his brother Henry (Counterlife 156; italics in original). In other words, one would do well to show some restraint, as Roth's characters more often than not humorously …