Portnoy's Complaint

Quite simply one of the funniest books ever written and an insightful glimpse into the male psyche, Portnoy stands up to the test of time. While some of the references might be dated and it would probably outrage people in America, who have become even more Puritanical than in 1969 (an equal spectrum offender of the right and left), the novel is a primal (and uproarious scream) of male desire, guilt, confusion, and identity crisis. Of course, it's also about the Jewish experience in white Anglo-Saxon America, where being an "other" or an outsider is part of Alex's identity. People who focus on the sex--and there's plenty (and hilarious) are missing the point. If you don't read this in the context of a therapy session, where nothing is off-limits and fantasies are exposed, you are misreading the book. How much of Alex's storytelling is real and how much is pure libidinal fantasy? There are no answers. All you know is that these are his forbidden desires. The section in Israel, where he goes impotent, is crucial to understanding precisely why he is in therapy and why he finds his shikses so desirable--they are forbidden and precisely what Sophie Portnoy doesn't want for him. A brilliant book with unmatched insight into the need to feel in control (Alex wants to play centerfield) when the world seems so chaotic, confusing, and out of control.

Not since Catch-22 have I read a book that could be so emotionally moving and so utterly hilarious to read. Roth's style is amazingly addictive, so that you feel like you have to keep reading to see what bizarre things happens next.

The main character of this story, Alexander Portnoy, is one of the most relatable characters I've read. At his core, he is a teenager in rebellion against his overbearing parents, trying to reconcile the societal pressure he feels to live up to their standards with a desire to have fun. Everyone has been Alexander Portnoy at one point in their lives. It's in the ridiculous ways that Alex tries to rebel that give this book it's edge.

Let it not be said that Phillip Roth is a shy writer. Portnoy's Complaint describes in exact detail the sexual escapades of our hero, both for the laughs and for the drama. While they aren't for everyone, I couldn't stop laughing and reading.

I recommend this book to anyone, especially college students going out into the world.

This novel is peddled typically as the great novel of masturbation or sexual explicitness as if these constituted Portnoy's "complaint". But Portnoy's "complaint" is the demonic level of despair he has inherited from his Jewish upbringing, and his Jewishness. Stretched out on the psychoanalytical couch he shrieks this despair (he complains!) in what can be read as high comedy or execrable whine, or both. I found the sexual elements crass and very nearly inconsequential counterpoints to the horripilating description of family life. His portraits of mother, father, extended family, and a whole host of subsequent girlfriends, as well as his own self-portrait simply make the skin crawl. Like "the Monkey" and others I craved some demonstration of love from Portnoy but there there were all too few perhaps deluded glimmers. Perhaps that is the point of the relentless sexual aggression and sense of degradation. I liked his girlfriends, don't know what it says about me. I wanted to see them treated better while recognising literature has its imperatives. Oddly I read this book over forty years ago as a coy Irish teenage boy but could remember nothing about it, nothing, not even the frenzied sexual gymnastry, which should have lived forever with the Irish teenager I was. Returning to it I am certainly more alive to the broader chemistry, the familial degradation and the essential struggle to the sexual death with Portnoy's own inescapable Jewishness. This latter is really what the novel is about. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Portnoy's Complaint is having to acknowledge that written today it would be unpublishable; to begin with it would be considered far too sexually violent and mysogynistic. Writers, especially male ones, who want to write with this intensity of sexual feeling, will soon have to resort to illicit or pornographic presses, as did their counterparts of a century ago. But don't worry, we will always have "Fifty Shades of Grey". I was torn between three and four stars for this review. While quite early in the novel I felt I did not want to spend time with the people there, I do have to acknowledge the manic intensity and inventiveness of Roth's writing, and his well-earned status as a superior writer. It is not a novel I particularly liked or will reread but I do recognise its value. So four stars it is.