A review by alyssa_tauber
The Counterlife by Philip Roth

2.0

This wasn't really a bad book-- the writing itself good-- it just wasn't the book for me. A lot of the book deals with issues of Judaism, with the characters going to Isreal, and dealing with being Jewish in East Coast America and England, and I just don't know enough about Judaism to be the audience for this book. At times I was very frusterated, because I didn't know enough about what the characters were talking about-- were their ideas 'normal,' or 'radical?'-- in order to form an opinion on it.
There were parts that I could get. I was interested in the idea of what was real and what was fiction, and those parts were engaging, but on the whole I was frusterated.
This is a good book, but it is a book for a niche audience, and I was not that audience.