Reading List: Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth

Hello readers and welcome back to another installment of the Reading List. As mentioned previously I have tried to work in more BIPOC and female authors on this list, but I also have a pretty big backlog of “old white dudes” sitting on bookshelves around my apartment that I need to read to round out the list. To that end I decided to read an author I have known about for years but never read: Philip Roth and his ridiculous 1969 work Portnoy’s Complaint.

A bizarre, hyper-sexualized tale of trysts and romps all theoretically poured out to a psychiatrist / psychologist in an office, the novel is the tale of one Alexander Portnoy and his weird life of involving himself with women and being obsequious to his Jewish parents. We never technically leave the session as it takes place within the entire book, with only the doctor commenting at the very end of the novel. We come to see how Alexander became the sexual deviant he is in his thirties through extended monologues focused on his childhood living under the thumb of a domineering mother and constipated, insurance-selling father. But the novel jumps around in time a lot more than that and consists of Portnoy’s current lust interest, a woman who is named as Mary Jane but whome Portnoy constantly refers to as “the Monkey.” We also travel with Portnoy to the land of Israel where he is confronted with aspects of his Jewishness that he has never gotten in touch with before the trip. And we see all the times in between where Portnoy wrestles with his budding sexuality and urges as a young child leading up to his first formative relationships, one of which he refuses to continue unless the woman converts to Judaism.

This book was an interesting yet off-putting look at what it was like to grow up in a Jewish family during World War II and afterward and how family dynamics played a key role in how the younger Alexander (and his sister, who gets mentioned in the beginning but later gets married off and we don’t see her very much) grows up in New Jersey during these crucial, important years of our nation’s history. We also see the struggles of Portony to unleash his sexual comportments versus his real ambition to do good in the world, from being on a Congressional committee to leading a high up position within the New York City government. But all of this is bogged down by the sexual tension that permeates the novel and while it may read as quiescent today, definitely shocked and appalled readers the world over when it was released at the end of the Sixties.

I don’t know that I would recommend this book to everyone as it is full of explicit material and ravages the psyche that is tormented by it. While apparently Roth wanted to use the psychologist’s session as a way to expose life as it really was during the sexual revolution it comes off as just bizarre (not to keep using that adjective) and something that I think a female audience would cringe through reading. I had read for years and years that this was Roth’s master work and while I don’t see that I am still considering reading more of his body of literature as I progress through my own writing career. Roth was indeed a towering force in American letters and influenced a whole generation of Jewish (and non-Jewish) writers to show their lives on the page in this country of ours. Thanks for joining me on this reading adventure.