2.

My situation in the East Hampton summer house was the stuff of Jewish comedy, if I’d had my Jewish antennae up. Had the brother been played by Christopher Walken, I was in a scene from Annie Hall. But I not only didn’t have my Jewish antennae up, I didn’t know I possessed any. By chance, and unlike a majority of Jews, I’d been raised so as not to take being Jewish, or in my case half-Jewish, in any way personally. I’d have to acquire those antennae elsewhere, by my reading.

It took overtly Jewish-American writing—by Bernard Malamud, who’d retired but was still lingering, thrillingly, around at the college the girl and I attended, and Saul Bellow, and yes, sometimes Roth, who is sometimes, when it serves the cause of the writing, overtly Jewish—to illuminate the connection between what I knew semi-consciously from the writing of the less-overt, such as Nathanael West or Barry Malzberg or Norman Mailer, as well as from sources like Groucho Marx and Abbie Hoffman and my Uncle Fred. What was it that was illuminated? That something aggravated and torrential in my voice, or perhaps I should call it my attempt at having a voice, was cultural in origin, even if aggravated and torrential frequently in the cause of disputing or even denying that point of origin.

As Roth points out, the books aren’t Jewish because they have Jews in them. The books are Jewish in how they won’t shut up or cease contradicting themselves, they’re Jewish in the way they’re sprung both from harangue and from defense against harangue, they’re Jewishly ruminative and provocative. Roth once said of Bellow that he closed the distance between Damon Runyon and Thomas Mann — well, given the generation of reader I’m from, Roth in turn closed the difference between Saul Bellow and Mad magazine. That’s to say, once I’d gained access to what he had to offer, Roth catalyzed my yearnings to high seriousness with the sense that the contemporary texture of reality demanded not only remorseless interrogation, but also remorseless caricature and ribbing. Contemporary reality, including perhaps especially the yearning to high seriousness, needed to be serially goosed.

3.

Speaking of caricature, I’m aware I may appear to have lapsed into schtick — a conflation of potted Rothian syntax and shameless confession. My only defense is that I’m employing tools Roth helped instill in me, tools that may in fact be all I’ve got: a reliance on the ear, for devising a voice and then following where the voices insist on going, and a helpless inclination to abide with the self—with one’s own inclinations and appetites—as a lens for seeing what’s willing to be seen, and as a medium for saying what wants to be said.

Call me instead a Counter-Roth. For it is the fate of a Roth, being the rare sort of writer whose major phases sprawl across decades, whose work encompasses and transcends modes of historical fiction, metafiction, memoir, the maximalist (or putters-in), the minimalist (or takers-out), the picaresque and counterfactual, etcetera and so forth—being the sort of writer who in his generosity half blots out the sky of possibility for those who come along after—to generate in his ambitious followers a sort of army of Counter-Roths. I’ll say it simply: the one certainty in my generation of writers, not otherwise unified, is that we all have some feeling about Roth. We can’t not. Mostly it involves some kind of strongly opinionated, half-aggrieved love.

4.

So, another confession: more than ten years after that encounter in East Hampton, I’d become a published novelist invited, for the first time, to a residence at the artist’s colony called Yaddo. By this time I’d pursued my Roth obsession to both ends of his bookshelf, as it existed at the time, as I was to continue following it, right up to the present. On my arrival at Yaddo, a fellow writer who helped me to my room at West House mentioned famous personages who’d written masterpieces behind the various windows—Sylvia Plath here, John Cheever there—and then, opening the door to what was to be my residence and studio both, unveiled a circular turret featuring a smooth domed ceiling: “The Breast Room,” he announced. I laughed, thinking he referred only to the shape. Then he explained that Roth, inspired by dwelling within the room’s contour, wrote The Breast there. As with many circumstances in a young writer’s life, I was exalted and humbled simultaneously — having been delivered by the Yaddo invitation into what I thought was my maturity, it turned out I was again to suckle at the fount of apprenticeship. Incidentally, if this story isn’t true, I don’t ever want to find out.