Philip Roth's surprisingly excellent first novel, Letting Go

There's a paragraph about 50 pages into Philip Roth's first novel, "Letting Go," in which he describes the character Herz and his Salvation Army overcoat - as good a descriptive paragraph as Roth ever wrote, maybe as anyone ever wrote, comic, precise, a true sketch of a whole character through observation of this tattered, over-sized, second-hand overcoat - and an obvious nod to Gorky and the Russian greats as well. I am struck, in reading (for the first time) this 1962 novel at how surely Roth established his style and his themes right from the outset of his career: the comic dialog between the protagonist (a Rothian character, Jewish intellectual in the Midwest trying to establish independence from his loving but overbearing family,in part through attractions to and liaisons with people, women, from the Protestant heartland) and his overbearing but very needy recently widowed Dad: a tennis game in which the dad keeps up a steady chatter, a scene in the dental chair (dad's a dentist) when dad examines son's teeth - but it's not about the teeth, it's about the father feeling abandoned (there are plenty of schools in New York!) and the son feels infantalized. This novel could truly have come at any phase during Roth's long career,though it's maybe a bit more provincial and conventional that some of the great works that were to follow.