num_pages: 330
description: 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 - a fierce tragedy of sexual need and blindness.
language: English
title: My Life as a Man
titlecomplete: My Life as a Man
genres: The United States Of America, Literature, 20th Century, Literary Fiction, Americana, Contemporary, American, Novels, Fiction, Classics
ratings_count: 2426
series: Complete Nathan Zuckerman
awards: awardedAt: 157795200000
name: National Book Award Finalist
category: Fiction
publisher: Vintage Books USA