I thought I was through with Zuckerman until, lo and behold, in the mid-1980s I... I wrote a book called The Counterlife, and here… Zuckerman's intelligence… Zuckerman's intelligence was what I needed in that book and he's not the main actor of the book, he was the main actor of the previous books but he's not the main actor in The Counterlife, but numerous others are – his brother, his family, his wife to be, in London, her family, and the book… in this book I... I left America and the book is planted in London and in Gloucestershire, and in Jerusalem and the West Bank of Israel. And it allowed me to expand my... my vision and make place… make place important, this really wasn't true in the previous Zuckerman books, so one, the focus is not entirely on him, but two, his intelligence is contemplating the material, and three, it takes place in new worlds for me. And it made me expansive, it produced – if I remember correctly – it produced a different kind of prose that I had been writing earlier and I felt that I had enlarged my view, really.

At this point I was living… in 1985 I was living in London half the time. I had begun living in London in 1977 about, so… and I would stay there six to seven months a year and come back here for the spring, the summer and the fall. And so I'd come to know something about London, very little I admit, but enough to fool people in that book, I think. I hope I fooled them!