I read somewhere that when Gabriel García Márquez finished working on his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, he and his wife, Mercedes, took it to be mailed, and all the way from their home to the post office she was thinking, Suppose it’s no good. When I finished Midnight’s Children, I thought, As far as I can tell, this is a good book; but after the long years of un-success I was utterly lacking in confidence in my own judgment, and I genuinely had no idea if anyone in the world would agree with me. If nobody agrees with me, I told myself, then maybe I don’t know what a good book is, and I should stop trying to write one. Everything was riding on the book’s reception. Hollywood or bust.

  Fortunately, it wasn’t bust, and I finally had an answer to my father’s question, “What will I tell my friends?”

  * * *

  —

  When I was a child in Bombay, I had a recurring flying dream, a version of which I would later give to a character in my novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. I would dream that I was in my own bed in my own room and when I opened my eyes in the dream I could simply float upward, shedding my covering bedsheets, and fly around the bedroom without any effort at all. It was easy, and so after a while I would fly toward the open window and go through it into the world. At once I would begin, very slowly, to lose height, not vertiginously or frighteningly, but perceptibly. As I have mentioned, our house in Bombay stood on the top of a little hill, and it became clear to me that a moment would come at which I would be too low down to be able to fly back into my bedroom and I would inevitably drop lower and lower toward the busy main road at the base of the hill, a road full of pedestrians, cyclists, scooter riders, and motorists, none of whom would care that there was a fallen angel in their midst. Somewhere around here I would wake up. The dream was a nightmare.

  The dream of becoming a writer is a little like that childhood dream. To achieve your dream you leave your safe place, in which you feel confident and protected, and you fly out into the world and you begin to lose height. If you are unlucky you land, as flightless as a dodo, in a crowd of unsympathetic strangers, and your dream turns out to be a nightmare. But if you’re lucky and determined, the dream recurs, and gradually you discover you don’t need the protection of your bedroom to stay up in the air and you can fly out through the window without feeling endangered. You no longer lose height or control. You navigate through the bright and buoyant air. Maybe you soar. But once you have found your wings, however long it takes, however many times you have failed before you found them, once you have found your wings, you fly.

  PHILIP ROTH

  (The Philip Roth Lecture, delivered at Newark Public Library on September 27, 2018.)

  The last time I heard from Philip Roth was in October 2017. “Because I am a son of Newark,” his email read, “the Newark Public Library has recently instituted a lecture series in my name….It’s only 12 minutes to Newark by train and not much more by car. This library and its branches were a great stimulant to me as a boy, and I’d be delighted if you’d come sometime in the latter half of September 2018 and talk about the present American moment, which is so exuberantly made manifest in your new book. Yours, Philip.”

  Now, if Philip Roth writes to you and asks you to deliver the Philip Roth Lecture, the correct answer to that question is “yes.” So I accepted immediately, and was also, I confess, surprised and flattered to know that Philip had read and liked my novel The Golden House. You don’t expect your literary heroes to read your work. I also agreed to talk, as he proposed, about this present American moment, which I will get around to doing. But after he died (I believe that Philip would have disliked “passed away” or “left us”; this was not a writer to whom one looked for euphemisms!) I felt that the first Philip Roth Lecture after Philip Roth’s death should properly take, as its subject, Philip Roth himself, a writer through whose writing many American moments, past and present, can be explored and understood and whose work, to use his phrase, has been a “great stimulant” to me, and many writers of my generation and the generations following mine.

  To my regret, I didn’t know Philip as well as I would have liked, in spite of my great admiration for his work and the happy coincidence of our being represented by the same literary agency, the Wylie Agency. We did however meet several times over a long period. My most vivid memory is of a conversation in London in the mid-1980s, at a dinner in the house in Chelsea where he was living with Claire Bloom. He spoke of his desire to return to America because of his growing dislike of British anti-Semitism, and the irritation caused by the accompanying British refusal to admit that there was such a thing as British anti-Semitism, and the desire of some British people to explain to Philip that he had probably made some sort of cultural misunderstanding. I have been thinking again about what Philip perceived all those years ago, because the British Labour Party has been for many years in the midst of a controversy about the widespread anti-Semitism within its ranks, a problem whose existence the party leadership has appeared to minimize or even deny until quite recently. Not for the first time, Philip Roth was a long way ahead of the curve.

  I told him that evening about my only personal experience of anti-Semitism. One summer when I was young, before I had published anything, and when I was not even slightly fashionable, I was somehow invited to a fashionable rooftop party in London, at which I was introduced to a designer of extremely fashionable hats, whose work, I was told, was often featured in Vogue. He was quite uninterested in meeting me, was curt to the point of discourtesy, and quickly went off in search of more-fashionable party guests. A few minutes later, however, he came back toward me at some speed, his whole body contorted into a shape designed to convey embarrassment and regret, and offered the following apology. “I’m so sorry,” he said, “you probably thought I was very rude to you just now, and actually, I probably was very rude, but you see, it’s because they told me you were Jewish.” The explanation was offered in tones that suggested I would immediately understand and forgive. I have never wanted so much to be able to say that I was in fact Jewish. When I recounted this incident to Philip, he said with great emphasis, “Exactly. That’s it, exactly.” So for that moment we were just a couple of Jews having dinner together in London. It’s a proud memory.

  I still have the battered Corgi paperback edition of Portnoy’s Complaint that I read in 1971, when I turned twenty-four years old. This was before I had ever set foot in the United States, a magic land that I knew only through its literature and its movies. America for me then was Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In Cold Blood, Rosemary’s Baby, Bullitt, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy, M*A*S*H, Love Story, Klute, Carnal Knowledge, and The Last Picture Show. In literature, it was Native Son and Invisible Man and Augie March. It was Pynchon and Vonnegut and Morrison and Updike’s Rabbit and Cheever’s “Swimmer” and Joseph Heller’s Yossarian and Nabokov’s Lolita. My knowledge of Jewish American life too came exclusively from books, from Bellow and Malamud and Singer. This is how America is to those of us looking at her from outside: simultaneously very well known indeed and totally unknown. It is both the embodiment of power and the many-sided expression of liberty, both Uncle Sam and Emma Lazarus, both “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Blue Suede Shoes” or Louis Armstrong singing “What a Wonderful World.” When as strangers we first set foot on New York streets, we think we recognize everything because we have seen it many times, filmed and photographed and televised and painted, and yet we don’t know our way around and easily get lost. We carry in our heads the music of America, but we don’t know the lives of the people from whom that music came, and, if we are bookish people, we carry the written words too, without really knowing anything of the lived experiences from which those words arose. Without ever having seen the Windy City I memorized the opening lines of Augie March, “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way…” and the equally celebrated last lines, “Why, I am a sort of Columbus of those near-at-hand and believe you can come to them in this immediate terra incognita that spreads out in every gaze. I may well be a flop at this line of endeavor. Columbus too thought he was a flop, probably, when they sent him back in chains. Which didn’t prove there was no America.” I was looking for help, for words that would open doors for me into the unknown lands that would, I hoped, spread out in my own gaze, and these words, these images, these sounds, were what I clung to. Maybe they would show me how to do what I wanted to do.

  Into this imaginary, imagined America, Portnoy’s Complaint dropped like a bomb. “Whacking Off”? “Cunt Crazy”? I’d never read anything like it. I can remember being genuinely astounded, not only by the subject matter but also by the rhapsodic glee with which it was treated, the unashamed nakedness of the language, the almost fanatical frankness of the prose. I grew up in India, where people weren’t even allowed to kiss onscreen in the movies, and public displays of affection were frowned upon in real life, and where the ancient sexuality of Tantric art had long ago been replaced by an easily shocked prudery of which I too was partly guilty. In my own writing I’ve often been reluctant to be explicit about the details of human sexual activity, believing that these things are best done offstage, so to speak, but there are scenes in which, looking back, I can easily discern the influence of Mr. Roth, about whom Jacqueline Susann—of all people, Jacqueline Susann!—said to Johnny Carson, “I’d like to meet him, but I wouldn’t want to shake his hand.”

  In Midnight’s Children there’s a moment in which the narrator’s mother, fondly remembering her long-lost first husband, pleasures herself in the bathroom, not knowing that her son the voyeur is hiding out in the family washing chest, watching her. This scene may be Philip Roth’s fault. In general, however, my narrators, unlike Alexander Portnoy, have found sex tough to write about. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, the narrator tries to describe his parents making love for the first time. “He came to her as a man goes to his doom, trembling but resolute, and it is around here that my words run out, so you will not learn from me the bloody details of what happened when she, and then he, and then they, and after that she, and at which he, and in response to that she, and with that, and in addition, and for a while, and then for a long time, and quietly, and noisily, and at the end of their endurance, and at last, and after that, until…phew! Boy! Over and done with!” This passage does owe to Roth my realization that if you are going to write about sex, make it funny. Elsewhere in that passage, I confess, I was given courage by my readings of Roth to be a little more shocking and, what’s more, to conflate sex and religion. “Did you ever see your father’s cock, your mother’s cunt? Yes or no, doesn’t matter, the point is these are mythical locations, surrounded by taboo, put off thy shoes for it is holy ground, as the Voice said on Mount Sinai, and if Abraham Zogoiby was playing the part of Moses then Aurora my mother sure as eggs was the Burning Bush.” Thank you, Philip. Taboos, he taught me, are there to be broken. This lesson has, on occasion, gotten me into trouble.

  During the biggest time of trouble, the furor that followed the publication of The Satanic Verses, I thought of Roth many times. I remembered that after the publication of Goodbye, Columbus he was accused by some Jews of anti-Semitism, and after the publication of Portnoy a Kabbalah scholar (Gershom Scholem) called the novel “worse than the notorious Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.” I also recalled that one of the ways in which his radical text was attacked was by accusing it of being unreadably bad writing. “The cruelest thing anyone can do with Portnoy’s Complaint,” Irving Howe wrote, “is read it twice.” That form of attack was one with which I also became familiar and that stung more than the assault of the ayatollah. It was comforting to know that Philip Roth had come through the same fire.

  In spite of Irving Howe, I have now read Portnoy’s Complaint twice. When I first read it, at age twenty-three, I was less than a decade older than Alexander Portnoy, and the anguish of male adolescence was still a living memory. What then struck me most forcibly was that this utterly unknown world, the world of a Jewish boyhood in Newark, felt so familiar to this Bombay boy. The overwhelming family above all. My own mother was quite unlike Sophie Portnoy, but many of my friends’ mothers—Hindu, Christian, Parsi—would have fit right in to Roth’s Newark. It was strange, and delightful, to find in this writing from far away so much that gave me the pleasure of instant recognition.

  Reading the book again at seventy-one, that recognition-pleasure is still there, even though Roth’s evocation of adolescence now seems to me like a message from a distant planet. What is most striking, however, is the sheer relentlessness of the text. If one were to be critical of it, one would say that it is all on the same note. But that note, that supercharged shriek of need, pain, and desire, that voice of which Roth said that, for the first time, he “let it rip,” had never been heard before and still, all these years later, retains all its power. Yes, it’s shocking, but also, yes, it still knocks you off your feet. To find this kind of speech today, we have to listen to stand-up comedians. Maybe Dave Chappelle is Alexander Portnoy’s African American child.

  To reread Portnoy and Goodbye, Columbus is also to encounter the earliest versions of what one might call the Rothian Beloved: Brenda Patimkin, Bubbles Girardi, the much-fantasized-about blond shiksa Alex Portnoy names Thereal McCoy, and most significantly Mary Jane Reed, a.k.a. the Monkey, whose sexual appetites match Alex’s own. The Rothian Beloved has come in for a good deal of criticism over the years, but the rediscovery of these first examples of the breed made me see, firstly, with what affection they are drawn, and secondly, that Roth’s male voices are quite obviously and deliberately unreliable narrators of his women. That is to say, we can see through Alex Portnoy’s tirade and understand that his creator sees his women with more profundity and passion than Alex does. One finishes Portnoy feeling a genuine affection for Alex, born of the knowledge that he represents a deep truth about young boys and men, but we come away with an equally deep affection for, and understanding of, the Monkey.

  Humor is what makes the book work. Without humor, Alex Portnoy and the novel itself would be unbearable. But there’s humor in every line, and so instead of finding him, and it, unbearable, we love him. After half a century, his power is undimmed.

  * * *

  —

  Here is what Philip Roth wrote in The New Yorker about rereading Saul Bellow’s Augie March, which was published fifteen years before Portnoy’s Complaint and undoubtedly helped to show Roth the way to his own work. “The transformation of the novelist who published Dangling Man in 1944 and The Victim in 1947 into the novelist who published The Adventures of Augie March in 1953 is revolutionary. Bellow overthrows everything….In Augie March, a very grand, assertive, freewheeling conception of both the novel and the world the novel represents breaks loose from all sorts of self-imposed strictures, the beginner’s principles of composition are subverted, and…the writer is himself ‘hipped on superabundance.’…There is the narcissistic enthusiasm for life in all its hybrid forms propelling Augie March, and there is an inexhaustible passion for the teemingness of dazzling specifics driving Saul Bellow.” If one substitutes Alexander Portnoy for Augie March, Letting Go and When She Was Good for Dangling Man and The Victim, and Philip Roth for Saul Bellow in this passage, we have a near perfect description of the revolutionary genius of Portnoy’s Complaint and its extraordinary impact, especially coming after the two more conventional novels that preceded it. The device of making the entire text a record of Alex’s session or sessions with his analyst set Roth free. “The theater of the analyst’s office,” he once said to David Remnick, “says the rule here is that there are no rules, the rule here is no inhibitions, the rule here is no restraint, the rule here is no decorum.”

  Roth and Bellow, Bellow and Roth. The two writers are forever yoked together, at least in the minds of writers of my generation. To give, again, the view from elsewhere: For Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, and myself, these were the two American writers who not only showed us America most clearly, most brilliantly—who took the American Jewish novel and transformed it into something pretty close to the Great American Novel—but who also helped us to see more clearly how to make the worlds we were trying to make.

  I was thinking a good deal about language, trying to find an English that didn’t sound like it belonged to the English, that could incorporate and represent the polyglot hubbub of the Indian street, and in Roth and Bellow I heard the energy I was striving for. I saw too a willingness to use untranslated words from another language. Reading Roth, I wondered, do all Americans know what it means to be given a zetz in the kishkes? Because I had to look it up. I guessed from context that a zetz was painful and that the kishkes were vulnerable, but the exact details eluded me. And yet here they were, Yiddish words in an English text, unapologetically offered. This was the way we spoke English in Bombay, sprinkling it with Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, or Gujarati words. It was also the way we spoke Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, and Gujarati, sprinkling those languages with English words where they seemed appropriate. Also, Indian English was not very like the Queen’s English. Like the Irish, West Indians, Australians, and Americans, Indians had reshaped English to suit themselves. The Indian English word for the accused person in a court case is the “undertrial,” because, you see, he is under trial. Your boss is your “incharge,” so Martians landing in Bombay would have to request, “Take me to your incharge.” When the police kill somebody in a shootout, he is said to have died in a police “encounter.” And sexual harassment, I’m sorry to report, is “Eve teasing.” I read Augie March and Portnoy and understood that I could use “my” English, just as these two masterworks used “theirs.” And if I wanted to drop in words from other languages—rutputty, khalaas, shanti—that was okay, as long as I made their meanings clear from context, so the Anglophone reader would understand, or guess, that rutputty meant something like “ramshackle,” khalaas meant, approximately, “finished” or “done for,” and shanti meant “peace.” English, I understood, could be chutnified. That was a moment of real liberation.