His Life as A Writer

It was a huge breakthrough for Roth.

"Something cracked open" while he was working on it, he recalls. "I remember the exuberance of the writing. I remember myself being surprised by the subject, and of course being surprised that it could be made into a literary subject."

Suggest that he was finding his voice, however, and he breaks in with an immediate correction:

"You said 'finding your voice' and I would say 'finding a voice.' Because the voice in 'The Human Stain' and the voice in 'The Professor of Desire' and the voice in 'Operation Shylock' -- they're all different voices."

"Portnoy" sold more than 400,000 hardcover copies. More important, it transformed Roth's public image from serious-minded literary craftsman to dirty-minded mass-culture phenomenon. He had to learn to cope with highbrow contempt ("The cruelest thing anyone can do with 'Portnoy's Complaint' is to read it twice," wrote Irving Howe in Commentary) as well as the mindless celebritization of his writing life. Not to mention that elusive distinction -- no, no, his mother was not Sophie Portnoy -- between fiction and fact.

Part of how he coped was to put poor Nathan Zuckerman through the same thing.

Take the judgment volunteered by an obsessed fan in "Zuckerman Unbound": "Flash, yes; depth, no. This is something you had to write to make a new beginning," the fan tells Zuckerman.

What does the real novelist make of this critique? He won't go there. "I don't remember that," he says.

Fair enough. Both Roth and Zuckerman spent far too many years being buffeted by aftershocks from the in-your-face novels that made them rich and set them free. Yet both did, eventually, learn how to deal.

Besides, dealing with the fallout from "Portnoy" could scarcely have been more difficult than rehabbing Roth's psyche after his marriage to the former Margaret Martinson Williams. Roth enlisted Zuckerman's help here, too. He gave him the last word on the subject of Maggie -- or Lydia, or Maureen, or Josie, as she's variously called in Roth's retellings -- at the end of a book called, simply and misleadingly, "The Facts."

It took a while, this marital exorcism.

By the time "The Facts" was published, his wife had been dead for 20 years.