Perhaps the most important aesthetic lesson of Roth’s youth, via readings of The Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn, was “the power of a voice”—now if only he could find a voice that sounded more like his own. Crucially, around the time he worried about giving up on himself, he discovered The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and was struck by a “kind of high-faluting [sic] conversational tone I like,” and also by Saul Bellow’s willingness to indulge in sprawling narrative abundance, not at all constrained by Neo-Aristotelian concerns with form and structure.
