That honor belongs to Henry Miller, says the on-and-off college professor, praising Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn and their author as a kind of “Whitman of the twentieth century,” though not as good. It was not as if Roth had invented the sexually explicit American novel. “If you take out Portnoy’s Complaint, it’s a very different career,” he says. The book also became a lens through which too many readers, he thinks, still view his other work. Using the first-person confessional intimacy of psychoanalysis to unbelt a torrent of sexual urges, Roth made scatological comedy of adolescent longing, forever linking his name to behaviors that betray the stereotype of a nice Jewish boy.
The book sold 400,000 copies in hardcover. In 1969, Portnoy’s Complaint made Roth into a celebrity and a figure of controversy. A student of British literature, he was inspired by Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, he told an interviewer recently, “who had taken the Jewish world that was near at hand and turned it into distinctive fiction.” Roth began looking to Newark and his own life for fictional material-eventually leading all readers to wonder, Which is which? Not bad for a twenty-six-year-old nobody. “I made a proposal to myself to come to New York and live on $100 a month.” In 1959, his debut novella was published with a handful of other stories, and it won the National Book Award. Living in Chicago and working toward his master’s while teaching freshman comp, he sold one story to Esquire for the impressive sum of $800. In the army he had written short stories. “Who were you before the publication of Goodbye, Columbus?” I ask.
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