January 19, 2009
Portnoy’s Complaint: Summary and notes
Portnoy’s Complaint is a book by Philip Roth that helped bring its author widespread critical and commercial success.
Published in 1969, the book tells the story of Alexander Portnoy, a 33-year-old Jewish bachelor, civil rights lawyer and New Jersey native. Portnoy himself narrates the book, telling the story while speaking to his psychoanalyst, Dr. Spielvogel.
At times, the book is laugh out loud funny. Portnoy describes things from several stages of his life, including his father’s constipation, his mother’s dominant personality, his relationship with a non-Jewish girlfriend, Mary Jane Reed (aka ‘The Monkey’) and a traumatic encounter with an Israeli woman at the end of the book.
Throughout the book, Roth develops themes of sexual desire and frustration. Those would become typical themes in Roth’s later work.
Other topics explored in Portnoy’s Complaint include Jewish assimilation, Jewish family relationships and the differences between American and Israeli Jews.
When it was first published, the book’s irreverent take on Jewish life caused an uproar. In addition, its frank sexual descriptions led to several bans at libraries in the United States and a import ban in Australia.
In New York Times review of the book, Josh Greenfeld advised readers not to “feel the least bit guilty about enjoying it thoroughly: I know not since “Catcher in the Rye” have I read an American novel with such pleasure.”
Time magazine included Portnoy in its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005.
Here’s how they described it in a 1969 review:
Roth’s barbaric yawp of a book was a literary instance of shock and awe, a dirty comic masterpiece that can stand with Tristram Shandy. (For the masturbation scenes alone it will endure forever.) It’s also, once you crawl out of the rubble of its most infamous passages, tender and charitable, and not just towards the main character. How else to describe a book that, while it charts the wild arc of Portnoy’s sexual and romantic misadventures—all of this being recounted by him to his therapist—discovers exactly the most painful question about relations between children and parents. “Doctor what should I rid myself of, tell me, the hatred… or the love?”
About three years after its publication, the book was adopted into a film version starring Richard Benjamin and Karen Black.