There is, as the folks in the head trades might say, a lot of rage in Philip Roth. What, one wonders, is he so angry about? As a writer, he seems to have had a pretty good roll of the dice. His first book, the collection of stories entitled Goodbye, Columbus, published when he was twenty-six, was a very great critical success; in brilliance, his literary debut was second in modern America perhaps only to that of Delmore Schwartz…. After two further novels, Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967), he wrote Portnoy's Complaint (1969), a succès fou, a tremendous hit both critically … and commercially (it was a bestseller of a kind that removes a writer permanently from the financial wars). One recalls the protagonist of Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, regularly muttering, "I want! I want! I want!" Philip Roth, who at an early age had critical attention, wealth, and celebrity, continues to mutter, "It isn't enough. It isn't enough. It isn't enough."
What does Philip Roth want? For one thing, he wishes to be recognized as a great writer, the natural successor to Gogol and Chekhov and Kafka. He wishes also to have the right to strike out against the bourgeoisie—particularly the Jewish bourgeoisie—and to be adored for his acute perceptions of it. And he wishes to have appreciated what he takes to be the universal application of his own experience as it has been transformed by the imagination in his several novels. Recognition, adoration, appreciation—all this would be his if people would only understand what his work is really about. Or so he believes, and so he would have us believe. But thus far all too few people do understand. In fact, they don't seem to understand at all.
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