Deception

by Philip Roth

“Were you embarrassed?” “No, I wasn’t embarrassed—I can’t afford to be embarrassed. I wanted to be very embarrassed, if you know what I mean.”

“Yes, but why am I so paralyzed?”

“And he has a big hang-up about sexual power, my husband. It’s a real problem. That’s why it went—because of his obsession with sexual power. Looking around at what you might call all our middle-class friends, they accept the limitations of their sex life.”

Caprice is at the heart of a writer’s nature. Exploration, fixation, isolation, venom, fetishism, austerity, levity, perplexity, childishness, et cetera.

‘By the time a novelist worth his salt is thirty-six, he’s no longer translating experience into a fable—he’s imposing his fable onto experience.’

The tyranny of the actual begins.”

“Yes, somewhere between desire and disillusionment on the long plummet to death.”

And it seemed to me a complete reversal of everything you said. All the deformities imposed on our time together were pointless, because

He is deaing with his own tendency toward betrayal???