The year after the “Portnoy” anniversary edition appeared, he published “ Sabbath’s Theater,” the masterpiece that initiated his prolific and profound late phase. In a sense, Roth did start out all over again. “Or that’s what I would probably be tempted to think if I were either starting out all over again or dead.” It was now 1994 at sixty-one, Roth had finally fulfilled his obligation to realize the stories suggested by this mysterious list. They are the openings of each of the novels that he had published up to the present, starting with “ Goodbye, Columbus,” in 1959 (“The first time I saw Brenda she asked me to hold her glasses”), and ending with “ Operation Shylock,” from 1993 (“For legal reasons, I have had to alter a number of facts in this book”). On it were typed “nineteen sentences that taken together made no sense at all,” which Roth reproduces in a single dense paragraph. He was a twenty-three-year-old student at the University of Chicago, he writes, freshly returned from an uneventful stint in the Army, and had just sat down to dinner at the campus cafeteria when he discovered a sheet of paper lying on his usual table. The twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of that atom bomb of American-Jewish hetero masculinity, “ Portnoy’s Complaint,” includes an afterword in which Philip Roth tells a joke, passed off with a straight face as a factual account, of how his famous novel came to be.
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