Portnoy's Complaint
by Philip Roth(1969)
Novelc. 280 pages
“She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.”
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One great work, every day
by Philip Roth(1969)
“She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise.”
Philip Roth(1969)
Alexander Portnoy, assistant commissioner of human opportunity, narrates his sexual obsessions, his Jewish mother, and his inability to escape either, all from a psychoanalyst's couch. Roth's novel scandalized and delighted in equal measure. The prose is manic, comic, obscene, and somehow also tender. Portnoy cannot stop confessing, cannot stop desiring, cannot grow up. The complaint is both psychological diagnosis and lament. Roth made American Jewish literature capable of saying anything. The novel is exhausting because Portnoy is exhausting. That is the point.