My Life as a Man

by Philip Roth Narrated by Dan John Miller

Overview

The Pulitzer Prize-winning, internationally acclaimed author of American Pastoral delivers a fierce tragedy of sexual need and blindness.

A fiction-within-a-fiction, a labyrinthine edifice of funny, mournful, and harrowing meditations on the fatal impasse between a man and a woman, My Life as a Man is Roth's most blistering novel.

At its heart lies the marriage of Peter and Maureen Tarnopol, a gifted young writer and the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead is his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and shored up by moral blackmail, but it is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen's death, Peter is still trying-and failing-to write his way free of it. Out of desperate inventions and cauterizing truths, acts of weakness, tenderheartedness, and shocking cruelty, Philip Roth creates a work worthy of Strindberg.

Editorial Reviews

Newsweek

Roth’s best…No writer alive can sustain a full-length novel at as high a decibel level as Philip Roth.”

From the Publisher

"Roth's best.... No writer alive can sustain a full-length novel at as high a decibel level as Philip Roth." —Newsweek

"[My Life as a Man is] a scalding, unique addition to the lasting literature about men and women." —Newsday

"A very grand work ... in invention, in perception ... in coming to grips with the wild inconsistencies of life and art." —New York Times

Library Journal

Roth's seventh novel, first published in 1974, introduces Peter Tarnopol and Nathan Zuckerman, characters who persist in Roth's subsequent works recounting middle age in midcentury American Jewish life. Here, two short stories foreshadowing some of Tarnopol's life issues are followed by a lengthier feature fleshing out these concerns. Tricked into an unhappy marriage to Maureen Ketterer, Peter pursues an affair with charming, rich, devoted Susan Seabury McCall. His conflicted ambivalence between the two consumes him emotionally until Maureen's accidental death. In this first commercial audio recording of My Life, actor/musician Dan John Miller sounds just as one imagines Peter would in telling his story; Maureen's and Susan's characters come across equally as well. Recommended as a classic of American literature.—Sandy Glover, Camas P.L., WA

MAY 2010 - AudioFile

Roth’s 1974 work—finally available on audio—bursts into life with Dan John Miller’s exceptional performance. The first section, “Useful Fictions,” consists of two entertaining short stories, which Miller performs well. The second section, the majority of the work, “My True Story,” is Peter Tarnopol’s first-person “memoir” of his rocky, emotionally wrought marriage to Maureen. Miller’s performance of this portion of the book is scintillating. His depictions of the battles and other emotionally charged moments between this couple are so vivid and realistic that listeners will feel as though they’re spying on their conflicted lives. The scene in which Peter’s unbridled hatred of Maureen erupts, leading to Maureen’s emotional and physical responses, is an audiobook triumph. D.J.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2011 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940192668542
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	06/04/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

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