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...