The Loneliness of the Long-form writer: Roth's first novel

Philip Roth's "Letting Go," which even the Library of America jacket blurb calls a "sprawling" novel, doesn't seem, to me, to sprawl particularly, not in the first section anyway - though it is very long for a first novel, or for almost any novel that would be published to day - but what I really note in the first section, aside from the obvious quality of the writing and the early establishment of themes and tropes that would be with Roth throughout his long and great career, is the loneliness of the protagonist, Gabe Wallach, and in fact of all the characters - partly because there are actually so few characters. Generally, short stories work be establishing only a very small # of characters and concentrating the action (there are exceptions - Ann Beattie for one); novels tend to open up much more and to be an opportunity for the writers to expand the universe of people, to develop or at least to sketch not only the protagonist or the narrator but a world of people. Roth began as a novella/short story writer, and Letting Go, his first novel, still carries some of the short-story sensibility - though at much greater length. In the first 75 or so pages, there really are only 5 characters, no minor characters or peripheral characters introduced at all: Gabe, his father the dentist back in nyc, his sole grad-school friend Herz and Herz's wife Libby, and the girl whom he starts to date and then rather abruptly pushes away, Marge. Each of these characters suffering from a great deal of loneliness and isolation - even though four are in a large university setting in the prime of their lives, supposedly, and one, the dad, has an active dental practice in New York - but it does not feel that way, they feel as isolated as characters in a French existential novel of the time, The Stranger, say.