In an indelible moment in Deception, Roth anticipates the #MeToo movement. Midway through the novel his namesake lies in bed with his lover, an English woman many see as inspired by Roth’s real-life British side piece. She playacts the court of public opinion, subjecting him to a show trial for participating in connubial relationships with the wives of friends and with younger women who were his students, as well as other adulterous acts.

“Please, the court is not eager to hear once again a discussion of literature from you. The women in your work are all vicious stereotypes. Was that your aim as a writer?”

“Many people have read the work otherwise.”

“Why did you portray Mrs. Portnoy as a hysteric? Why did you portray Lucy Nelson as a psychopath? Why did you portray Maureen Tarnopol as a liar and a cheat? Does this not defame and denigrate women? Why do you depict women as shrews, if not to malign them?”

“Why did Shakespeare? You refer to women as though every woman is a person to be extolled.”

“You dare compare yourself to Shakespeare?”

“I am only—”

“Next you will be comparing yourself to Margaret Atwood and Alice Walker!”

Simon & Schuster hyped Deception as “Roth’s most provocative novel about the erotic life since Portnoy’s Complaint” and dressed it in a tawdry softcore cover of faceless bodies entangled in bedsheets. Its stunt-fiction aspect—a novel consisting only of dialogue!—also accounts for its lack of regard. In the April 2012 Atlantic, Joseph O’Neill refers to Deception in the negative for its preponderance of staginess: “Roth has a weakness for play-like dialogue that is, in fact, a weakness. Deception [1990], written entirely in the form of conversations, is unproductively hard going, and the playlets scattered in some of his novels have a low wattage.” For all O’Neill’s considerable powers, he is a traditionalist. In “Two Paths for the Novel,” from the Nov. 20, 2008 New York Review of Books, Zadie Smith frames him as an old-school realist in a famous comparison with Tom McCarthy’s speculative avant-garde novels. Forbears like William Gaddis’s JR (1975) and Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976) rely largely on dialogue, but their foci are far afield. Even Roth himself seemed perplexed, viewing Deception more as an opportunity to delve into how “talking and listening are almost erotic activities,” in a 1990 interview with Brian D. Johnson for McCall’s.

In many reckonings of 2020, however, Deception feels amazingly apropos. The times are dramatic and we dramatize them. Our advocacies are unleashed instantaneously and we take selfies at the demonstration. It seems like all life is now is dialogue—smartphoned blurts, “rude truths” (to allude to Ross Posnack’s 2008 critical study Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity), and disembodied voices. No handshakes, just Skype calls. No work meetings, just Slack chats. No classrooms, just Zooms. The line between public and private self as blurred by social media is a given. Twitter discourse privileges artless immaturity, transposes propaganda for virtue, and replaces expertise with celebrity. Ownership of one’s self-exposure has never been more fraught and freighted. Doesn’t stop us, though, and in embracing the stance of the unapologetically cavalier, Roth was ahead of his time.

That said, after his death, the New York Times asked twenty-three writers to name “Philip Roth’s best book” and Deception received not a mention. The New Yorker’s “Remembering Philip Roth” interviewed nine authors and the book didn’t make that lineup either. Nor did The Guardian’s “14 writers on their favourite Philip Roth novels” afford Deception a slot. Yet reading the deft concision and thoroughgoing clarity with which Roth writes about the sexual mores and practices of his own era, one can see clearly how that honesty-first tradition carries on today in the liberated works of exciting female authors like Adelle Waldman, Catherine Lacey, Sally Rooney, Rachel Khong, Kiley Reid, Kate Folk, and Clare Sestanovich.

What’s immediately noticeable about Deception’s style is that, as stated above, it’s straight dialogue, no narrative prose. The reader drops in medias res, the dialogue unattributed, and yet it’s never hard to distinguish who’s speaking, the character Philip Roth or his female lover. Some former flames and insecure menfolk make appearances as well, all seamlessly discernible. And the sultriness works because it occurs between the lines, freeing it from the dreaded clichés of bad sex writing.

Deception is exceedingly speedy, a masterpiece of succinctness, propulsion, and focused kinesis; it races like a film helmed by a director notorious for quick shoots. This is most impressive because its subject is middle age, and yet the novel is never sentimental, maudlin, or trite. This now barely discussed life period provides terse articulations of the lovers’ places on the sexuality spectrum, their lies to others and to self, their concerns about being perceived weak or strong, what they’ll tolerate or won’t, and of course, “What are your real feelings about the Jews?” The truest line is spoken when they vent about their spouses’ flaws and the woman states, “The more trivial the defect the more anger it inspires.”

There is passion and drinking, depression and Schubert, and it reads so rapidly that it all but scrolls. It is like finding an unlocked smartphone and getting a glimpse at the text-bubbled record of two married people stepping out, paramour and inamorata.

I cannot emphasize enough how uncanny this is—in 2020, as many of us read both novels and romantic exchanges on screens—looking at everything typed out, an excavated thing, a found art object, an abject eavesdropping on a series of intimate back-and-forths. He turns fifty-one during the book, set in the middle of the eighties, and she’s fifteen years his junior and a Christian. They entertain the reader with pithy parley, bantering about divorced friends, ruined children, and her husband who’s carrying on an extramarital liaison of his own, with a “tootsie” no less, all while she’s confronting mental health issues and a lump on her cervix, and as the Roth character interviews Czech prostitutes and ex-lovers.

In 2020, where almost everything is shouted in ALL CAPS, croutoned with exclamation points, and accompanied by explosive emojis, all without any vetting save for the punitive vicissitudes of the masses, couples don’t really have “affairs.” They cheat. They commit infidelities. They initiate rendezvous and trysts with screennames and swipes, behind avatars and e-dentities. In the nineties, we still had affairs, though even then we knew they were relics. As George Costanza says in a 1992 Seinfeld—the only episode of the series directed by Jason Alexander, who plays George, an alter ego of the show’s co-creator Larry David, who manifests in Curb Your Enthusiasm an even Roth-ier fate—“An affair! That’s so adult. It’s like with stockings and martinis and William Holden.”

The stalwart thespian might draw one’s mind to Sunset Blvd., yet this novel is not about the deceptions of the movie world but the then-still-prestigious literary one. A proxy for Harold Pinter even arrives to debate Philip Roth’s stand-in. Fitting, because the deeper theme is the deception of masculinity, its capricious requirements and from whence those gristly dogmas stem—male privilege or testosterone, society or biology or the nexus of the two. She describes her husband as strange, to which “Philip Roth” replies, “He sounds rather typical to me…Penetrate and withdraw. Penetrate and withdraw. He may be extraordinary in some ways but he’s not strange.” There’s even a discussion of Madame Bovary that manages not to be tiresome. The British mistress calls it “my handbook” and her lover advocates, “You should read a little aloud to your daughter each night at bedtime. Flaubert’s a good girls’ guide to men.”

Consider also the single-worded meta-level of the title. What is it that fine art, great literature, and enduring entertainment do? They manipulate. They calibrate, craft, and incarnate deceptions. From Homer to Homer Simpson and from Hamlet to the Muppets, the arts inspire the imagination to take over, to make the reader or viewer invest themselves, to care about the fates of fictional beings on pages or stages or screens.

As Roth dives into the rabbit hole of alternate selves and characters from earlier novels (references to Zuckerman Bound and The Prague Orgy (both 1985) proliferate), his self-named character begins to cadge to that most banally masculine deception of all, worrying over one’s legacy. The formal gambits and feints could be read skeptically by a certain type of reader, one more easily wearied by Czech-inspired mirroring, Gombrowicz-aping self-characterization, interspliced narratives, and structuralist philosophizing about reproduction (as in childbearing and as in the publishing of texts). But when the character Philip Roth and his mistress muse about “the terrible ambiguity of the ‘I’” and “all these improvisations on a self,” we enter the more egalitarian realm of humanism itself, not to mention a now pervasive method of reflexivity found in everything from new-canon shibboleths like David Shields’s Reality Hunger (2010) and Jonathan Lethem’s The Ecstasy of Influence (2011) to recent practitioners like 2020’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland or 2018 novel Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday, itself directly inspired by Roth, and written, and quite well, by one of his former lovers. Some might even argue that Roth presages “autofiction,” though others would propound that the nouveau genre is too lazy to engage in deception.

In the hyper-now of fake news, racial privilege disputations, anti-Semitism outbreaks from quarters that front as progressive, and rampart coronavirus misinformation, deceptions besiege us nigh daily. We have to ask of our attractions to people, concepts, and artworks: Do we love the person/thing we love, or do we love our fantasy of it?

Politics, race, and idealized justice appear as pungent chords in Deception, reminding us that the viciously abusive discriminations of the police can occur not just in the US but in Czechoslovakia, Chile, and Cuba, under the tyranny of capitalism and communism both. In its political and domestic spheres, this taut novel’s timeliness and universality are enlivening. It is a “book shed of all expository fat,” as a character within describes. This pared-down quality makes it kin to fellow New Jerseyan Bruce Springsteen’s album Nebraska (1982), a step away from the mainstream that gets at a rawness the troubadour’s more maximalist works do not.

It is also, for Roth, a last skinny one before a five-book stretch of longer novels—from Operation Shylock (1993) through The Human Stain (2000)—and a forecast of the slimmer volumes he would publish at the end of his life, the five novella-length works published from Everyman (2006) through Nemesis (2010), his final release.

Deception is Roth’s greatest unifying theme. Operation Shylock exposes the deceptions of identity appropriation and the limitations of legal recourse. In The Counterlife it’s the diaspora Jew and the Zionist Jew and the way each sees the other as duped. In American Pastoral it’s the nuclear family. In I Married a Communist it’s marriage, politics, and love. In The Human Stain it’s race and passing. In Sabbath’s Theater’s tragedy and Portnoy’s Complaint’s comedy it’s sex and psychology. In Indignation it’s religion/theism. In Patrimony it’s what you think you inherit versus what you actually inherit. The Great American Novel mocks that all-encompassing and forever failing eponym and pairs well with Our Gang, Roth’s satire of deceiver-in-chief Richard Nixon. The Ghost Writer grips us with a woman who may or may not be a surviving Anne Frank. The Humbling unmasks the performances we all practice, the actor as allegory. Or go back to his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (another prophetic title for the year of 2020), where Roth tells us that “You Can’t Tell a Man by the Song That He Sings,” interrogates the sham that is the “Conversion of the Jews,” and follows a young working-class protagonist deceived by the enticements of the upper-middle class.

Oscar Wilde, perhaps our best evocateur of philandering, said that the purpose of art is to make us look at a thing a second time. Thirty years hence, in a tumultuous season, amid pandemic and social upheavals, the sex drive remains unquelled. Through erratic quarantines and valiant protest marches, reality-TV presidents and looting sprees, married people haven’t stopped having affairs, and artists (yes, “artists,” people, not “creatives”) forever conspire to construct works that will land them in the plover of innovation instead of the muck of gimmicky. Deception deserves that Wildean revisitation to trumpet its merits as allied with the former. Or, to close with one of Roth’s coruscating ripostes from this underappreciated opal, one that educes a pun on Wilde by providing the defense of an unideal husband and serves as a metaphor for a divided nation as well: “To attempt to escape the marriage is an ingredient of marriage.”