The Facts

The Facts is an unconventional autobiography. Roth concentrates on five episodes from his life: his secure city childhood in the 1930s and '40s; his education in American life at a conventional college; his passionate entanglement, as an ambitious young man, with the angriest person he ever met (the "girl of my dreams" Roth calls her); his clash, as a fledgling writer, with a Jewish establishment outraged by "Goodbye, Columbus"; and his discovery, in the excesses of the sixties, of an unmined side to his talent that led him to write "Portnoy's Complaint." The book concludes, in true Rothian fashion, with a sustained assault by the novelist against his proficiencies as an autobiographer.