Book Review: Portnoy's Complaint (1969) by Philip Roth

The Raskolnikov of Jerking Off

Yes, I know what day it is. If you haven’t yet, for the love of god, go vote for Harris! And then try to avoid the news for at least a few hours. It’s not going to tell you anything useful. Let’s waste some time thinking about a different obscene and vulgar man together.

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What is he doing to himself, this fool! this idiot! this furtive boy! This sex maniac! He simply cannot—will not—control the fires in his putz, the fevers in his brain, the desire continually burning within for the new, the wild, the unthought-of and, if you can imagine such a thing, the undreamt-of. Where cunt is concerned he lives in a condition that has neither diminished nor in any significant way been refined from what it was when he was fifteen years old and could not get up from his seat in the classroom without hiding a hard-on beneath his three-ring notebook. Every girl he sees turns out (hold your hats) to be carrying around between her legs—a real cunt. Amazing! Astonishing! Still can’t get over the fantastic idea that when you are looking at a girl, you are looking at somebody who is guaranteed to have on her— a cunt! They all have cunts! Right under their dresses! Cunts—for fucking! (100-101)

If you know anything about Portnoy’s Complaint, it’s the smut. I came to it knowing almost nothing, except that it was a dirty book, it put Philip Roth on the map, and that it was controversial at the time. This is a very dirty book. It’s not ‘spicy’ in the sense that it seeks to arouse sexual feeling. It is explicit but not pornographic, unless, perhaps, your kink is shame. 

In my last book review of Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, I said that it contained the most uses of the word cunt that I’d ever encountered in American literature. Portnoy’s Complaint immediately broke this personal record. There are an incredible number of cunts in this book. Also: shlongs, putzes, schmucks, shvantzes, shtupping. The filth is bilingual. There is a tremendous preoccupation with goyim and shikses. 

Portnoy’s Complaint takes the form of a first-person address from Alexander Portnoy, 33-year-old civil servant, to his psychiatrist. Portnoy is an educated man, an enlightened man, a champion of progressive causes in the New York City government. He is also a sex maniac and a guilt-ridden Jew. The book is an account of the origins of his preoccupations and their sequelae. 

The first cunt we meet is his mother’s. In one of Portnoy’s earliest memories, he recalls watching his mother pulling on her stockings and smelling her cunt. He is obsessed and oppressed by his mother, a high-strung, passionate woman who threatens, cajoles, and berates Alex, even while bragging about his academic and professional accomplishments to the other neighborhood women. From a young age, he notices women. Puberty is a blur of onanistic shame, a series of escalating masturbatory stunts and sexual misadventures, culminating in an unspeakable act that I won’t attempt to describe, lest it spoil your supper.

Actual sexual achievement does not quench the mania; rather, it is inflamed. Well into his thirties, the madness continues. His relationships last six months, a year, 18 months, but there is never a risk of anything more: Portnoy must always seek the next new cunt, ass, pair of tits. Gradually, in his discursive way, Portnoy reveals the disastrous details of his latest failed relationship, with a woman he calls Monkey. She is a sexual fantasy come to life, a functionally illiterate underwear model from West Virginia.  

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Portnoy is what we’d probably call a self-hating Jew, but the actual diagnosis is more complex than that glib phrase. He is neurotic, resentful, at turns superior about his heritage and deeply ashamed. There’s a chip on his shoulder the size of New Jersey. When a shikse girlfriend brings him home for Thanksgiving, Portnoy conjures scenes of bigotry in his head, planning out elaborate speeches in response to imagined insults:

“When the aunts and uncles come for the Thanksgiving dinner, please, let there be no anti-Semite among them! Because if someone starts in with “the pushy Jews,” or says “kike” or “jewed him down”—Well, I’ll jew them down all right, I’ll jew their fucking teeth down their throat! No, no violence (as if I even had it in me), let them be violent, that’s their way. No, I’ll rise from my seat—and (vuh den?) make a speech! I will shame and humiliate them in their bigoted hearts! Quote the Declaration of Independence over their candied yams! Who the fuck are they, I’ll ask, to think they own Thanksgiving!” (223)

At the same time, he disparages the overbearing culture of protectiveness and boasting amongst the Jewish mothers of Newark, calling them cows given the curse of language. The mothers plague their sons with the curse of their impossible expectations. He laments the high drama imbued into every family interaction, the potential for any small thing to became a giant fucking federal offense at any moment. He is an atheist who refuses from age 15 to step into a synagogue for the High Holidays. 

I get why this book was condemned by Jewish critics as a gift to antisemites. The portrayal of Portnoy’s tortured relationship to his Jewishness is unflattering, even ugly. The caricatures of overbearing Jewish mothers and whingeing neurotic Jewish men are distressingly familiar, from fiction and from crude jokes. I understand Philip Roth to be a devoted chronicler of his middle-class Jewish Newark, so I trust that there is a kernel of truth to his depictions. But I don’t know any Jews like the Portnoys. These characters did not exist in my family or my Jewish community, as I remember it. Husbands were not hen-pecked, wives were not domineering, guilt was not a cudgel. Maybe my family was too far removed from immigrant life, too assimilated. Too Midwestern, maybe. Neither of my Jewish grandparents spoke Yiddish; my dad doesn’t remember my great-grandparents speaking more than a few words of Yiddish, either. I don’t know if my grandparents, who were just a little bit older than Roth, ever read Portnoy’s Complaint. If they had, I imagine that, even as liberal and modern as they were, they would’ve considered it an affront to Jewish (and American) decency. (To my family members, please correct me if I’m wrong; maybe Peggy Selonick loved this book?)

The ugliness especially emerges when Alex flees the wreckage of his relationship with Monkey, seeking refuge in Israel. Portnoy cannot accept the reality of the young, vital nation; it takes on a dreamlike quality for him, the concept of a nation full of Jews short-circuits his neural pathways. He has two failed sexual encounters there, including one that is genuinely disturbing—my stomach dropped as it took a darker turn than the slapstick sex and masturbation scenes throughout the book.

There’s another moment that gave me pause. In the midst of recounting his family’s dietary habits, Portnoy turns his attention to Chinese restaurants, where the family will suspend their kosher diet and indulge in pork–by some twisted logic, pork doesn’t count as long as it’s consumed in a Chinese restaurant. In spite of Alex’s progressive beliefs and feelings towards other disadvantaged minorities, the Chinese catch a stray in this passage:

Yes, the only people in the world whom it seems to me the Jews are not afraid of are the Chinese. Because, one, the way they speak English makes my father sound like Lord Chesterfield; two, the insides of their heads are just so much fried rice anyway; and three, to them we are not Jews but white—and maybe even Anglo-Saxon. Imagine! No wonder the waiters can’t intimidate us. To them we’re just some big-nosed variety of WASP! (89)

Obviously, a statement in Portnoy’s voice doesn’t imply endorsement from Roth, but this offhand racism that serves no particular narrative purpose strikes me as lazy. Of course, ultimately it’s the Jews themselves, with their inferiority complex, who are at the butt of this joke, but it’s also not not at the expense of the Chinese. 

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Let me confess that, by and large, I did not grapple with big thoughts about Jewish identity and antisemitism and misogyny while I was reading this book. I read it over the course of a few days while I was convalescing from COVID, after I’d watched so much House that I thought my brain would simply leak from my ears. The virus was raging within me and I couldn’t physically concentrate on anything too complicated. It’s a funny book, and I enjoyed reading it. Ha, ha, he’s whacking off again was my primary level of engagement with the text. Irving Howe wrote a long, erudite, and incisive critique of Goodbye, Columbus and Portnoy’s Complaint in 1972 that I’d encourage you to read if you’re craving a more intellectual discussion of Roth’s positioning in the canon of Jewish literature than I can provide, and also if you enjoy sick burns like this one:

The cruelest thing anyone can do with Portnoy’s Complaint is to read it twice. An assemblage of gags strung onto the outcry of an analytic patient, the book thrives best on casual responses; it demands little more from the reader than a nightclub performer demands: a rapid exchange of laugh for punch-line, a breath or two of rest, some variations on the first response, and a quick exit. 

The book looms so large that I found myself surprised that this is all it was. It reads like it was great fun to write, and that not much care went into the revisions. Take it, then, for what it is: an artifact of the sexual revolution. Read it once, not too closely, and laugh at the parts where he whacks off.

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Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth: 6.9/10 (nice)