Portnoy's Complaint

Name: Portnoy's Complaint
Author: Philip Roth

Philip Roth · 1969

One long howl from a psychoanalyst's couch. Alexander Portnoy, a guilt-strangled New Jersey son, confesses everything to his silent analyst: the smothering mother, the martyred father, and an adolescence of compulsive masturbation pursued with a desperation that is somehow both filthy and holy. Roth's 1969 monologue made him famous and infamous in the same week: it blew open what American fiction could say out loud about sex, shame, and the Jewish family, and it is still the funniest thing he wrote. The whole book is that confession, unspooling without pause, the reader stuck in the analyst's chair.

The case against

on Portnoy’s character
“Portnoy is really no more than just a horny creep with a big mouth.”
Matt Hanson · The Arts Fuse, 2019
on the Monkey
“there’s the Monkey, the stupid, hillbilly girlfriend Portnoy wrestles with”
three stars · a book blog
on the book’s structure
“An assemblage of gags strung onto the outcry of an analytic patient”
Irving Howe · Commentary, 1972
on the Chinese restaurant scene
“this offhand racism that serves no particular narrative purpose strikes me as lazy.”
a Substack review