It's recently been brought to my attention that my book reviews frequently are not actually about the book. And I'm wondering why would you want to know about the book when all you have to do is click on the little blurb about the book and then get on with the fascinating reading about...oh, say where I bought my milk last Tuesday or my fondest/most traumatic childhood memory, etc, etc.And, yet. I aim to please so here is my sincere attempt to tell you something about this book. It (the book) goes something like this:sexsexsexsexguiltguiltguiltguiltsexsexsexguiltguiltmoms faultguiltmoms faultmoms faultguilt sexsexguiltkinda dads fault toomostly moms faultguiltsexsexsexself loathingJewish loathingprotestant loathingprotestant awemore jewish loathingagain with the Protestant loathingsexsexguilt guiltguiltguiltpartial reconciliation with perceptions of all things Jewishattempt at sexfailure at sexguiltguiltguiltmom's faultNow that I've, no doubt drawn you into the plot line and compelled you to pick up the book for yourself, let me share with you some of my personal thoughts on the book.Growing up conservative/fundamentalist(?) Christian, I am no stranger to guilt. As a matter of fact some times I feel that Catholics and Jewish people think they have the market cornered on guilt, well, you know what? taint so. I got some pretty messed up voices going on in my head too, ya know. And maybe I can't articulate my guilt trips into clever phrases or pinpoint experiences but I can tell you that guilt taught me a thing or two.1. If I don't pick up that clutter someone else is going to have to. When I was younger this meant my mom, whom after setting aside her career as an artist to raise 5 kids and nearly had (maybe did have at one point) a nervous breakdown from the lack of money, the accumulation of clutter and my argumentative nature. In my adult life this means the custodian, whom after leaving Vietnam as an educated person has to toil with 2 and sometimes 3 jobs to send his son (and seemingly only hope at respectability in this career driven society of ours) to college.2. Flour is not cheap and ingredients are not to be wasted! oh, the shame, the shame of ruining yet ANOTHER batch of gingerbread men.3. pre-marital sex is BAD. BAD! BAD! BAD! Offering yourself as anything less than a virgin to your someday husband is tantamount to giving someone a big bag of steaming compost with worms crawling through it for their birthday. The only thing worse than pre-marital sex is being gay.*it might be worth noting here that there was some guilt reprieve and gargantuan amounts of titillating conversation regarding what exactly you COULD do, short of having sex but even that was fraught with the anxiety of "accidentally" having sex. and I"m still a little hazy on whether or not I can participate in oral sex. I'm assuming it's a no go, while (okay Catholics and Jewish people, I have to admit I've got it easier here) masturbating is okay AS LONG AS one doesn't start fantasizing about others while masturbating. Which you gotta hand it to them (wa-ha-ha) is that not the purest form of masturbation?4. Paper is meant to be used and re-used and re-used and re-used and re-used. Buying new paper is an intolerable opulence reserved for gluttonous pigs and ONLY gluttonous pigs. etc, etc, etc, so, did I find Portnoy's excessive guilt to be unreasonable or unreadable, not at all. I found it to be hilarious in it's familiarity. Matter of fact I found most of the book to be hilarious, which I hadn't anticipated. Some passages that I found particularly amusing are as follows:-when he ate pudding he shouldn't have, "Well, good Christ, how was I supposed to know all that, Hanna? Who looks into the fine points when he's hungry? I'm eight years old and chocolate pudding happens to get me hot.-Talking to his "doctor", "All I do is complain, the repugnance seems, bottomless, and I'm beginning to wonder if maybe enough isn't enough. I hear myself indulging in the kind of ritualized bellyaching that is just what gives psychoanalytic patients such a bad name with the general public"-a child hood sexual fantasy, "Her favorite line of prose is a masterpiece, 'Fuck my pussy, Fuckface, till I faint.' when I fart in the bathtub, she kneels naked on the tile floor, leans all the way over, and kisses the bubbles."-While observing "goys" at the skating rink, "Jesus, look how guiltlessly they eat between meals! what girls!"-about a non Jewish girlfriend, ".....played polo (yes, a games form on top of a horse!)But humor aside, I also appreciated some other aspects of the story. I loved the line, "What I'm saying, Doctor, is that I don't seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds-as though through fucking I will discover America". I remember standing alone in NYC (coming from a small town in Oregon) at age 17 and seeing the enormous variety of people and thinking how great it would be to be with the deaf man, the black man, the man in a wheel chair, the businessman, etc,etc,etc. Thinking how much I would KNOW if I could be with all of them (not simultaneously - gross! and not to worry, mom-should you come across this- I wasn't thinking sleep with them, just dates ya know, just some museums trips and a dinner here or there. okay maybe some light petting too, but really that's as far as that fantasy went). In the end I didn't broaden my horizons that way, I ended up dating one guy. One very nice Jewish boy. But still, I like the idea.And finally I'd like to say that I think I damn near cried at one point near the end and yes, I did also nearly cry this week when I saw a mud flap of that silhouetted naked lady because I so hate the "ideal" that society feels so comfortable imposing on us less than "perfect" females, and I was a little chocked up when my son said, "I like having you for a mom", and all of this near teary-ness might indicate a certain hormonal fluctuation orrrrrrrrr it might indicate that I'm a sensitive genius? consider. Regardless, I felt sorry for the pathetic schlep at one point.And thus concludes my thorough look at Portnoy's complaints plot points as well as the ubiquitous ME, ME, ME portion of my review.
Funniest book I have ever read. Bar none. I never, NEVER laugh out loud while reading and I was literally howling several times as I read this. It's so awful and so true. Teenage sexual obsession/repression (isn't it funny how the two go together) and religious guilt/ political guilt (ditto) have been linked before, but never as desperately, bitterly funny as this.I always used to wonder why "realistic" novels about adolescence don't talk about masterbation. I mean everybody does it, right? And besides, it plays a pretty key role in every young person's life, moving into adulthood and beyond.Is it telling in some way that jacking off must be presented exaggeratedly, comedically, in the midst of a ridiculous rant about repression and Jewish guilt? I mean, they banned Ulysses for this very reason, in part.It's also wonderfully written, every aspect of Alexander Portnoy is given due place, his wit and his anger and his confusion and- most importantly- his apocalyptic self-consciousness, with a manic self-referential humor just propelling the damn thing forward.Also, I'd like to point out that I am, in fact, unbearably goyish, from the Mass suburbs, raised fundie Christian, am genetically a WASP, and...get ready...a MAYFLOWER fucking DESCENDENT (!) and I related to this book in discreet, rather shocking ways that I never thought a book would or could suggest. I didn't hump any cold cuts, just so we're clear, but still...Ironically, I am actually an interesting example of the ironies in acclaiming the universality of art. Which I do, all the time, whether it's academically hip or not.See, the universality thing is usually about cultural distance from the writer or the subject matter. I mean, I've never been to Russia, let alone have any of the same religious inclinations, but Tolstoy (for a random example) really does speak to me, about my life and my personal interests and issues and conflicts, etc. It's the old canard, you think you're alone but then you read...Ok so the funny part, for me as it would be for Portnoy (and probably Roth too) is that poor Portnoy is obsessed with the ethnic and cultural details that make him *other* from the mainstream, of his time and place at least, and how certain aspects of his cultural inheritance are fucking him up, particularly when it comes to his sex life. It's hard out here for a heeb with a hard-on. And, of course, it's especially a big deal for him to want to bang shiksas- the forbidden fruit, the sexy goyim, the all-too-sweet, All-American pussy his neurotic ass covets above all else.It's not just about wanting to relieve his teenage lust it's also rather political, isn't it? It's about sticking it where it don't belong, fantasizing about getting his stone tablets off on the most wholesomely looking type possible, because it's funnier and dirtier and freakier and more liberating that way. Arguably, at least.Ok well what's funny to me is that, dear reader, I am in fact the physical manifestation of the kind of All-American look Portnoy longs to spooge over. I am tall (6'4''), blonde, blue eyed, broad of shoulder, stout of chest, the whole bit. People who know me well and people who don't often make jokes about my being a Viking. Genetically, this isn't really the case: the aforementioned Mayflower, Irish, Scottish, bit of German here, bit of French Huguenot there, from suburban Massachusetts, as All-American as can be.And yet I related to Portnoy deeply, dare I say "intimately." His internal voice was remarkably similar to my own, at least at times, in certain aspects. Even as I was pretty much the perfect example of the so-called mainstream American guy/gal Portnoy is alternately aghast at and aroused by, I felt more kinship with this character than I ever had from anybody in, say, Cheever, Updike, or (for crying out loud) Hawthorne.So, friends and neighbors, let this be a lesson- ain't no happiness no place, as the Chris Rock once memorably opined. Part of the reason I did love this book was because goes farther than most books you have ever read have tried and sit ucceeds 90% of the time. Promise.Caveat:I think the humor and the narrative snap of this book is basically best appreciated if somebody reading it is equally as outraged as they are entertained and scabrously scandalized by them.If you can think that your own (sex) life is ridiculous and pathetic and also, simultanously, incorrigibly, find the circumstances of it funny in a hyper-active, Jerry-by-way-of-Richard Lewis, Borscht-Belt kinda way....then this book is for you. Re-edited my review since I hadn't thought of this book in years and come across an interesting article by a guy who wrote some social criticism using it as a diving-board...http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...And, despite a few howlers, the Guardian has some fine things to say, and that top photo of Roth in full-on Bill and Ted mode is priceless...http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/books...
What do You think about Portnoy's Complaint (1995)?
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)Regular readers will remember that I'm in the middle of a long-term literary project right now, to read all eleven novels making up Philip Roth's autobiographical "Zuckerman cycle" in order to better understand the Postmodernist Era they discuss, from its start (right around Kennedy's assassination) to its end (9/11); but since so many of at least the early novels in the series concern themselves so directly with Roth's first big mainstream hit, 1969's filthy and funny Portnoy's Complaint, I thought it would be instructive to read that as well, to better understand the way that Roth's life changed because of it. For those who don't know, after an early start as a traditional, academic-style Late Modernist writer who was getting published in The New Yorker in the early '60s, this hilarious look at the sexual dysfunctions inherent in the New York Jewish lifestyle, and its inherent clashes against the prevailing "let it all hang out" countercultural mood, was exactly what mainstream America needed at the exact moment they needed it, just like Woody Allen was providing in cinemas at the same time; and so not only was it a hit with the usual intellectual crowd, but it broke through to become a massive general hit, an eventual Hollywood film, and even a tittering codeword among the culture at large, right at the same time that his fellow young New Yorker author John Updike was doing the same thing with his saucy novel Couples (the very first mainstream book to discuss the topic of suburban wife-swapping, after obscenity laws in the US getting relaxed just a few years earlier).And to be fair, this is still a dirty, dirty book, with it easy to understand why merely carrying a copy around back then was enough to signal to anyone else that you could "dig it," which much like Woody Allen takes the image of the nebbish, self-deprecatory Jewish city boy and almost accidentally turns it into a new type of nerdy sex symbol, as we follow poor Portnoy's adventures as first an onanistic teen and then a goy-obsessed young man, flailing about in the high-minded hippie atmosphere around him but still managing to have crazy sex on a regular basis anyway. And it's easy to see why so many older Jews got so upset by this book too; because not only does it lay out a lot of the quiet little dysfunctional moments of the Jewish community to a large Christian audience, a direct predecessor to Seinfeld that I've discussed in more depth in my Zuckerman write-ups, but indeed a lot of its humor derives explicitly from all the neurotic hangups that were created among Roth's generation by all their uptight, obsessed-with-appearances, Holocaust-surviving parents, making it not just a funny sex comedy but an astute look at the first generation of Jews to grow up after World War Two, and the clashes that occurred when they first came of age in the countercultural '60s, which I'm sure made it even more of a must-read among the young hipsters of the time. A great, moving, blush-inducing novel that still holds up really well to this day, read it to understand what was getting your parents all squirmy in the years that they were having you.
—Jason Pettus
Portnoy's Complaint has become known as "the sex book" by Philip Roth, and without a doubt it is not a book for those squeamish about frank & honest sexual portrayal. The book features Portnoy, a 30-something Jewish man from Newark, NJ apparently unleashing a 300 page tirade on his shrink as he describes his shortcomings in becoming the expectation of a Jewish man. He still struggles with what he deems juvenile, if not downright animalistic, sexual longings and impulses, yet he maintains a position in the New York mayor's cabinet and is by all exterior signals a very successful, intellectual man. His sexual urges and needs preclude him from being close to a woman beyond sex, though he wishes he could settle into the family-centric existence expected by his parents and his Weequahic neighborhood. Instead of falling in line with these expectations or dreams, however you interpret them, he is drawn to the exact opposite: lusting after shikses and not the "nice jewish girls" his mother desires for him, public masturbation & other sex acts, etc. But it is also obvious that the quiet family (jewish) life is not put on a pedestal either; his family appears as a bunch of raving lunatics bent on invading their son's life and protecting him from any possible harm, from infection to loneliness to infection to disease to injury to infection. His parents are satirized but he still longs for the life laid out for him. It is a complex novel about best-laid plans and the reality of human nature, and the constant conflict between the two.the most interesting part of the book comes near the conclusion, when he dumps his erotic flavor of the week in athens while on vacation and hops a plane to israel in a state of disarray over his condition and life. at first, we think this might be the rehabilitation he needs; he marvels at no longer being a minority, but rather, in a country of jews, run by jews, where even the ice cream man is jewish. however, after he nearly succeeds in raping a socialist jewish woman in his hotel room, we see that he doesn't fit into this class either; he is simply a man who doesn't fit into any category. is this so much different than all of us? our parents create our expectations for us from birth, but in reality these expectations only fit into several categories, while the kaleidoscope of human personality far exceeds these simplistic classifications of what our lives should be.
—Andrew
Newark, 1960's to 70's. This is the life, or to be specific, sex-story of Alexander Portnoy from his boyhood to his 30's. He is a Jew and his family transferred from New Jersey to more Jew-friendly Newark when he was a boy. During that time too, his loquacious mother used to threaten him with a knife if he did not want to eat his meal. The same mother used to hold his penis for him to urinate.The story seems to tell that it was his mother who made him into a person with excessive wandering libido. In his teenage years, he masturbated almost every hour of his waking moments. In his young adult life, he had several sexual partners from his wife, mistress to even prostitutes.Normally, I rate this kind of novel with 1 star. However, this is said to be the most popular novel of my favorite Philip Roth. Earlier I read his American Pastoral(1997) and The Human Stain (2000) and I liked both of them. So, even if I read in the blurbs what this book seems to be about, I read it.Not sure if I missed anything but it is still what it is: a book about excessive libido. Mr. Roth, himself a Jew, only used the Jew-trying-to-fit-into-postwar-America backdrop but it is still a sex book - a masturbation book. This is definitely not for the faint-hearted. Every page has either sex or Jew mentioned. Just too much but still a fascinating read.
—K.D. Absolutely
