The Counterlife

I recently received the fifth volume of the Library of America's newly published Philip Roth's Novels and Other Narratives. Here is an excerpt from the book's first novel - The Counterlife - in which Henry (alternating protagonist/antagonist) finds his famous brother Nathan's unpublished novel, which to his surprise serializes all of Nathan's missteps under Henry's name.

Exaggeration. Exaggeration, falsification, rampant caricature -- everything, thought Henry, about my vocation, to which precision. accuracy, and mechanical exactness are absolutely essential, overstated, overdrawn, and vulgarly enlarged. Witness the galling misrepresentation of my relations with Wendy. Sure when the patient is in the hair, and he's got the hygienist or assistant working on him, and she's playing with his mouth with her delicate hands and everything is hanging all over him, sure there is a part of it that stimulates, in the patient, sexual fantasy. But when I am doing an implant, and the whole mouth is torn open, and the tissue detached from the bone, and the teeth, the roots, all exposed, and the assistant's hands are in there with mine, when I've got four, even six, hands working on the patient, the last thing I'm thinking is about sex. You stop concentrating, you let that enter, and you fuck up -- and I'm not a dentist who fucks up. I am a success, Nathan. I don't life all day vicariously in my head -- I live with saliva, blood, bone, teeth, my hands in mouths as raw and real as the meat in the butcher's window.