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It is part of Roth's immense gift that he can somehow make obsessive masturbation, paranoia and four-letter words funny and therefore ultimately inoffensive. No one has written so amusingly and yet so crassly about sex since Henry Miller. How does Roth do it? It is no secret that laughter is one of man's best defenses against those things that embarrass and terrorize him. Neither is it a secret that those who can make us laugh the loudest are often the most embarrassed and terrorized.
"Right now, Portnoy's Complaint is an event," says Philip Roth. "In two years it will be a book." The event was preceded by an enormous advance buildup; excerpts from the book were reprinted in various magazines, and the more outrageous passages were quoted and passed around. Now an assured hit that was sold out in bookshops weeks before its publication date, Portnoy's Complaint has already brought Roth a $250,000 advance on royalties, $350,000 in paperback sales and $250,000 for the
I Hollywood rights.
All of Roth's books have sold well, but he has never really been controversial or had his apartment examined in gossip columns ("the smart East 80s ... very solid, no patterns"). Now that Alexander Portnoy has made him a celebrity, he is dodging fame with SalI ingeresque determination—which, of course, only draws more attention to him. He used to answer the phone, "Benito Cereno here."* Now he doesn't answer his phone at all, and he tends to
I check in with his publisher long after business hours.
Letting Go. In many ways, Roth's past life resembles Alex Portnoy's. He was born 35 years ago in a heavily Jewish section of Newark. His father worked for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. Philip zipped through Newark public schools skipping a grade, went on to graduate from Bucknell University magna cum laude. In 1955 he took an M.A. and became an instructor at the University of Chicago, where Theodore Solotaroff, editor of the New American Review, remembers him as "a handsome young man who stood out in the lean and bedraggled midst of us veteran graduate students as though he had strayed into class from the business school."
Already Roth's miniatures of urban Jewish life were selling to magazines. The collection of short stories, Goodbye, Columbus, won Roth the National Book Award in 1960 at the age of 26 and two years later the prestigious job of writer-in-residence at Princeton. There he discovered to his dismay that his students could not write. In addition, his marriage to an older divorcee collapsed after four years. Philip went to New York after the publication of Letting Go, a troubled novel that interweaves threads from his Chicago adventure, his marriage and his grim life as a graduate student. The central question of the novel presages the issue that confronts Portnoy, only in reverse: Can one really let go of the self, renounce personal gratification for the sake of others? In Manhattan, Roth plunged into psychoanalysis, wrote a play that never got past the workshop stage, often retired to the writers' colony at Yaddo, a verdant estate in Saratoga Springs.