" The critic Irving Howe cracked that the “cruelest thing anyone can do with ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ is to read it twice.” Howe had it all wrong. Roth turned self-obsession into art. Over time, he took on vast themes—love, lust, loneliness, marriage, masculinity, ambition, community, solitude, loyalty, betrayal, patriotism, rebellion, piety, disgrace, the body, the imagination, American history, mortality, the relentless mistakes of life—and he did so in a variety of forms: comedy, parody, romance, conventional narrative, postmodernism, autofiction. In each performance of a self, Roth captured a distinct sound and consciousness. The tonal and stylistic road travelled from Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus” to his “Sabbath’s Theater” is as long as that from Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” to his “Interstellar Space.” There are books among Roth’s thirty-one that I have no plans to revisit—“Letting Go,” “Deception,” “The Humbling”—but in nearly fifty years of reading him I’ve never been bored." ...