There was so much onanism in the novel (“I am the Raskolnikov of jerking off — the sticky evidence is everywhere!”) that the writer Jacqueline Susann said on “The Tonight Show” that she’d love to meet Roth but did not want to shake his hand.

Roth, who never won the Nobel Prize many predicted for him, once said, “I wonder if I had called ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ ‘The Orgasm Under Rapacious Capitalism,’ if I would thereby have earned the favor of the Swedish Academy.”

Below the humane comedy that filled much of Roth’s work, and the sense of a longing to both transcend and embrace his lower-middle-class Jewish origins (Roth grew up in Newark’s Weequahic neighborhood), he wrote with enormous insight about bedrock things like one’s relationship with one’s mother and father.

Zuckerman, his alter ego, referred to his mother in “The Anatomy Lesson” (1983), in a typically poised phrase, as “a breast, then a lap, then a fading voice calling after him, ‘Be careful.’”

About such women’s husbands, he wrote in “American Pastoral” (1997):

“Mr. Levov was one of those slum-reared Jewish fathers whose rough-hewn, undereducated perspective goaded a whole generation of striving, college-educated Jewish sons: a father for whom everything is an unshakable duty, for whom there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between, a father whose compound of ambitions, biases and beliefs is so unruffled by careful thinking that he isn’t as easy to escape from as he seems. Limited men with limitless energy; men quick to be friendly and quick to be fed up; men for whom the most serious thing in life is to keep going despite everything. And we were their sons. It was our job to love them.”

“American Pastoral,” which won a Pulitzer Prize, may be the most realized of Roth’s novels. Among other things, the ability he displays in it to write about children, while having had none of his own, is nothing short of mind-shaking.

For certain other readers, his greatest novel may be the vastly darker “Sabbath’s Theater” (1995), about an aging and priapic ex-puppeteer. Lust and shame were the driving forces behind much of Roth’s fiction. In sex, too, talk was central to appeal. Roth wrote about the joys of both “phonetic seduction” and “a finely calibrated relative clause.”