Philip Roth’s breakthrough novel, the runaway bestseller that made him a giant of American literature, was Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). Roth’s name is inextricably linked with that novel, for reasons both good and ill: its raucous humor, its depiction of a stifling postwar Jewish household, the primal scream of its sex-obsessed and Oedipally-tormented narrator Alexander Portnoy. With his death at age 85, Roth will be widely commemorated as that author, even confused with the character he created. Yet he was much more than that.

A rag-bag of skits about a masturbating mad boy, Portnoy’s Complaint is, yes, funny and outrageous. No reader has ever forgotten the hero’s sexual experimentation with a piece of liver. Yet Portnoy’s Complaint is one of Roth’s minor works, a quick read that dealt with the perversity of sexual desire but merely touched on the other themes—the tension between art and life, the competing claims of family and individual freedom, the fate of Jewish identity in the American melting pot—that are the backbone of Roth’s truly great books: Zuckerman Bound (1985), The Counterlife (1986), and, above all, Sabbath’s Theater (1995).

Still, Portnoy’s Complaint was a milestone in Roth’s career, and not just because of its commercial success. It was the novel where Roth truly found his voice as a fiction writer. His three apprentice books—the story collection Goodbye, Columbus (1959) and the novels Letting Go (1962) and When She Was Good (1967)—are all deftly written but very much the work of a cagey student deploying the tricks he learned in school. Roth, who had been educated at Bucknell University and the University of Chicago before going on to teach creative writing at the University of Iowa, seemed to be a perfect specimen of the MFA style promoted by academia. Like the canonical figures upheld at the time, Gustave Flaubert perhaps supreme, Roth wrote with detachment and deliberation. His peculiar voice, which would become so familiar in later decades, is only faintly discernible in those books.

Portnoy’s Complaint was Roth’s breakthrough book because he said good-bye to the fusty seriousness of his formal education. It was the novel where he started talking in the vernacular, using slang and swear-words in run-on sentences that had the jauntiness of dorm-room talk.

What liberated Roth was popular culture. As a boy he had been an avid radio listener and as an adult he got to see the birth of modern stand-up comedy in Chicago, where Nichols and May, along with Lenny Bruce, were inventing a new form of stage humor based on the interplay of voices (cerebral, sex-obsessed, and often inflected with the language of therapy). It was Roth’s genius to realize that the language of stand-up comedy could reinvigorate literary fiction.