What Roth hath wrought: His novels are really about one single character

Someone - John Cheever? - warned young writers against writing short stories - you'll burn up too much of your material. The implication being: each short story could develop into a novel. Maybe so, though I think there are fundamental differences between the forms that go far beyond length: there's the sense, which I've posted on before, that stories focus on misfits and isolates and novels encompass entire societies and therefor their characters tend to be more conventional, even if rebellious. That's a very broad generalization but I hope based on truth - despite the many exceptions we can think of. Philip Roth of course began his career with an astonishingly good collection of stories, and then went on to write his first novel, "Letting Go," which is in 6 sections, each something of a novella. The sections do not exactly grow organically - I suppose you could read them in various orders or could skip an entire section - but all of them are tied together by the main character, the guy who narrates some of the sections, Gabe Wallach, a sometime stand-in for the author. Roth was obviously not worried about burning all of his material: in Letting Go he works through many of the major themes of his life up to that point (Jewish childhood, struggles with father, early marriage and romances, academic life - though not Newark, and not the Army, both of which he wrote of in Goodbye, Columbus - Newark would become his Yaknapatawpha), yet somehow he knew that he could go back to this well again and again over the course of the long writing career that lay ahead of him. Letting Go is full of incident but it's not plot driven - none of Roth's novels are. We don't read him for plot but for character, setting, observation, discussion of ideas, comedy, and in a sense all of Roth's novels are about one character and his evolution and development, his struggles with his family and his community, his faith and his art, his sexual drive and his depths of guilt - Roth himself.