fictional versions of himself.
He wrote Goodbye, Columbus and the stories collected in that volume, he said, because that was what aspiring writers did in those days -- they wrote stories and hoped to publish them in places like The New Yorker and The Paris Review, which he succeeded in doing. Then, in the late 1950s, he deliberately set out to write a big, ambitious novel -- which turned out as Letting Go, his longest book by far, and one that combines elements of James, Bellow, and even Dostoyevsky.
From 1962 to 1967, Roth published hardly a word. It was the longest drought of his career. "I really didn't know where to go," he said, "and I had two or three false starts -- significant false starts of a hundred pages or so. They're down in the Library of Congress -- the Library of False Starts, they ought to call it. And then I decided I would just completely shift into this other tone, which was as unlike the other books as it could be."
Twenty-five years later, in the chaste pages of The Library of America, Portnoy's Complaint still goes off like a bomb. It's irreverent; brash and angry at times, full of feeling and affection at others; and in those censorious times, it surely contained more masturbation scenes than any book not sold from under the counter. It's a dirty book that happens to be extremely funny, and vice versa, and fairly or not, it may be the book for which Roth will always be best known, the one that got him labeled both a pervert and a betrayer of the Jews.
"So many people of the people who claimed to be offended by the book said they were offended by the masturbation," he recalled. "But that's silly. Everybody knew about masturbation. What they were really offended by was the depiction of this level of brutality in a Jewish family."
For Roth, and for US fiction in general, Portnoy's Complaint was the end of an era -- of apprenticing oneself to the old literary models and carefully observing the rules of literary procedure and decorum. And it was the beginning of a period, still going on, of figuring out what to do when there are no longer any rules.
A few years ago, some critics began to write off Roth. But starting with Sabbath's Theater, in 1995, and continuing through The Plot Against America, which came out a year ago, he has experienced an extraordinary burst of second wind. "I think I've gotten better," he said decisively, dismissing the notion that the young writer, the one with the burning eyes staring out from the Library of America jacket, might have been able to do things the older one can't. But he has been thinking lately about writers who weren't so lucky and who petered out -- about Hemingway, for example.
"Booze," he said. "Booze was the problem with Hemingway, with Faulkner and with so many others. They both died in their early 60s. It's almost inconceivable." At this time of year, Roth still reads outside in the early evenings, in a tent of mosquito netting, until the daylight fades, and his main vice is then slipping indoors to check on the Yankees for a couple of hours. "The canonized go on," he said, adding that he has just about finished a new piece, which he called "a very long story, 90 pages or so, and very dark." Pressed to describe it further he said, "That's it -- 90 dark pages."
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