Portnoy's Complaint (1969) is American writer Philip Roth's fourth and, to date, still most popular novel, with many of its characteristics (ribald, comedic prose; themes of sexual desire and sexual frustration; a self-conscious literariness) having gone on to become Roth trademarks.
Structurally, Portnoy's Complaint is a continuous monologue as narrated by its eponymous speaker, Alexander Portnoy, to his psychoanalyst, Dr. Spielvogel. This narration weaves effortlessly through time and describes scenes from each stage in Portnoy's life, with every recollection in some way touching upon Portnoy's central dilemma: his inability to enjoy the fruits of his sexual adventures even as his extreme libidinal urges force him to seek release in ever more creative (and, in his mind, degrading and shameful) acts of eroticism. Roth is not subtle about defining this as the main theme of his book. On the first page of the novel one finds this clinical definition of "Portnoy's Complaint", as if ripped from the pages of a manual on sexual dysfunction:
- Portnoy's Complaint: A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature...
Portnoy's Complaint, in addition to its purely literary status as a "comic masterpiece", is also emblematic of the times during which it was published. Most obviously, the book's sexual frankness was both a product of and an inspiration for the sexual revolution that was in full-swing during the late 1960s. And the book's narrative style, a huge departure from the stately, semi-Jamesian prose of Roth's earlier novels, has often been likened to the stand-up performances of '60s comedian Lenny Bruce.
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2 Trivia 3 External Resources |
Ever since its publication, speculation has abounded as to how much of
Portnoy's Complaint is fiction and how much is thinly-veiled
biography. Roth himself pokes fun at these parlor games in his 1985
novel Zuckerman Unbound, where alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman is
continually accosted by clue-less strangers who cannot believe he was exercising the creative faculties of a writer when he wrote the sex scenes in Carnovsky (the alter-novel to Portnoy's Complaint).
Still, by cross-referencing data from interviews, the autobiography of
ex-wife Claire Bloom, Roth's own pseudo-autobiography The Facts, and his more biographically mimetic Zuckerman novels, the following can be established about Portnoy's Complaint with a high degree of certainty:
Biographical Underpinnings
Trivia
Following in the footsteps of Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint was in 1972 made into a film starring Richard Benjamin and Karen Black. The results were decidedly less successful than the first movie, though, with Leonard Maltin calling it a "cinematic massacre".
External Resources