Not Quite Letting Go: Rethinking the “tragic sense of life” in Roth’s First Novel

Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) is rightly seen as the breakthrough novel in which Roth made his escape from a range of stifling literary prescriptions. But how revisionist is the fiction before Portnoy? While critics have tended to regard Roth’s first novel as either continuous with his early literary allegiances, or already in open defiance of them, this article argues instead that close attention to the way Letting Go (1962) explores the concept of tragedy reveals an ambivalent novel, and a writer at the crossroads.