At first the novel seems like a peep-show into an adulterous affair. She is married with a child, a job, a nanny, and a husband who parades his mistress in her face. She is severely conflicted about everything and is contemplating divorce. He is suffering the alienation of an American in England. This talk is the subject matter of the book. Occasionally, they stray into other pet Roth subjects like fathers, mothers, misogyny, his work, and the Jews.
But then the talk shifts to other female voices: a jet-setting Czech prostitute who wants Roth to help her write a novel; a 33-year old Polish woman with a child who also wants him to help her write; an English woman from his past in New York who is suffering from cancer; his wife who accidentally discovers his notebook with all these “conversations.” Roth defends his notebook, saying that all the women recorded within are fictional characters. He sums it up as, “But then I am not the only man who thinks about imaginary women while in the bedroom with the woman he regularly sleeps with. There may even be women who behave just as impurely in their bedrooms with the men they regularly sleep with. The difference is that what I impurely imagine, I am impelled to develop and write down. In my imagination I am unfaithful to everybody, by the way, not just to you.”
During these post-coital periods of euphoria and unburdening, he postulates about adultery and the life of a writer with pearls of wisdom such as:1) “One of the unfair things about adultery, when you compare the lover to the spouse, the lover is never seen in those awful dreary circumstances, arguing about the vegetables, or burning toast, or forgetting to ring up for something, or putting upon someone or being put upon. All that stuff, I think, people deliberately keep out of affairs.”2) “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.”3) When asked where he stands : “Yes, somewhere between desire and disillusionment on the long plummet to death.”4) When asked why he likes East Europeans (in real life Roth was helping dissident Eastern Block writers at the time) he says: “Displaced persons have things to tell me.
