From the ecstatic comedy of Portnoy’s Complaint to the narrative richness of his American Trilogy, Philip Roth was a writer of genuine originality, says Martin Amis

As tributes pour in to Philip Roth, it is worth looking back to his early career, which was one of the strangest in American letters. Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) was my introduction to his work. I read it in the first edition of the paperback, and I thought: Here we have a really deafening new voice, and a whole new way of being funny – transgressive, corrosive, but with something ecstatic in its comedy.

Then I worked my way through the three predecessors: Goodbye, Columbus, Letting Go, and When She Was Good. They were engaging and diverting; they made you think, they made you smile, often, but they didn’t make you laugh. Ah, I thought, he’s what Saul Bellow calls “an exuberance hoarder”, restrained by High Seriousness and, in his case, restrained by an exaggerated reverence for Henry James. Portnoy was his real “letting go”; now the comic energies will surely surge and swell.

A writer’s life is not as detached and monastic as some would like to think