The books that followed it, Our Gang, The Breast, and The Great American Novel, were also attempts at outlandishness. I... I was trying to see what outlandishness could do for me, you know, and I knew it. I knew it. I just thought keep going, keep going, go beyond Whacking Off. I published a story at that point called: On The Air, which is far and away the worst thing I've ever written. But it... it went so far, it went over the top really. My friend Ted Solotaroff published it in the New American Review because his magazine was doing that too. Every... Everybody was doing it. Let the impossible in, you know. Let the indecent in. See what happens.

And so those books all attempted to... to treat the material as farce, as... as wild comedy, as slapstick, and that's as far as I went in that direction. I've never written a book like Portnoy's Complaint again, except perhaps for Sabbath's Theater, which I think is a far better book. And I found the right character in this guy Mickey Sabbath and I found the right adventures. And I think that's the… that's the best performance I've ever given, really.