Anger at the feelings of shame and degradation one is made to feel after giving in to sexual urges.Īnd Portnoy's anger at his upbringing. There's a level of anger running beneath it all, often boiling over. Portnoy's Complaint is one of Roth's most angry books too. And one with the most sustained point of view.

This is one of Roth's liveliest and most innovatively written works. This perspective also lets him jump around stylewise-as it's delivered in a monologue by Portnoy, rambling from from confessional to stream of consciousness to political diatribes to standup comedian-style rants. This allows Roth to jump around in time to look at different periods in Portnoy's life. The story is framed as a psychoanalytical examination of the 'lust-ridden' Alexander Portnoy, delivered as though he were on the doctor's couch. It's professedly about the morality of sex. (And, to be fair, there is one particularly disgusting incident involving jerking off in the novel.)īut it's also about more than sex, perverse or otherwise. So you see it's about more than masturbation-though the sin of Onan was probably considered perverse by many back then. It is hypothesized that the condition arises from the mother-child relationship. Roth prefaces the novel with a faux definition of 'Portnoy's Complaint', as though it were a medical disorder 'in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longing, often of a perverse nature' including exhibitionism, fetishism, auto erotica, and so on, leading to feelings of shame. Which, as any longtime, serious reader of literature should know, does not preclude it also being tremendously entertaining. There's been a lot raunchier and more explicit stuff available since 1969.īut Philip Roth is a serious literary writer and Portnoy's Complaint is serious literature.

This couldn't be just because it's about sex. Plus, it's earned a seemingly permanent place in the admittedly low-brow culture with references popping up all over. How many of those early readers and non-readers would be shocked to discover that far from fading from fashion after being replaced on the bestselling lists by scandalous successors, Portnoy's Complaint has lasted more than four decades and counting? In fact, today it's practically considered an American modern classic.

Lots of people assumed a compulsion to masturbate was the protagonist's 'complaint'. Even if you never read Portnoy's Complaint then, you'd heard the novel dealt with masturbation. It was one of the naughtier books-but not the naughtiest-in a long line of books that scandalized some and enticed many in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Portnoy's complaint