Deception

by Philip Roth

“Play dumb if you like, but you know the truth. You only enter into life to keep the conversation going. Even sex is really at the edge. You are not driven by eros—you are not driven by anything. Only by this boyish curiosity. Only by this gee-whiz naïveté. Here are people—women—who do not live life as material but live it soulfully. And for you the more soulful the better. You like it best when they are in posttraumatic shock trying to recover their lives, like Olina fresh from Prague. You like it best when these soulful women can’t actually tell their own tales but struggle for access to their story. That is the erotica of it for you. The exotica too. Every woman a fuck, every fuck a Scheherazade. They have not been able to gain access to their story and in the telling of their story there is a kind of compulsion to complete the life—and there is much pathos in this. Of course it is stirring; just the wash of their sound, the quality of intimate conversation, to you is stirring. What is stirring is not necessarily in the stories but in their urge to make the stories. The undevelopedness, the unplottedness, what is merely latent, that is actuality, you are right. Life before the narrative takes over is life. They try to fill with their words the enormous chasm between the act itself and the narrativizing of it. And you listen and rush to write it down and then you ruin it with your rotten fictionalizing.”