Philip Roth has won a lot of prizes. He is the only author in recent history to accumulate all of the United States’ four major literary awards in a single decade, culminating with the Pulitzer Prize for “American Pastoral” in 1997. He has won the PEN/Faulkner award twice, and in 2001 the American Academy of Arts and Letters granted him the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six years for an author’s entire body of work.
“Portnoy’s Complaint” has won none of these awards, not because it is poorly written, but because it’s from an earlier era, less than ten years after Roth’s 1959 debut novel, “Goodbye, Columbus.” Consequently, “Portnoy’s Com-plaint” is not on the level of the 1990s Roth—a man whose novels display astonishing breadth and internal fluidity, weaving and juxtaposing material across time and memory in the way that earned him the Pulitzer for “Pastoral.” The 1967 Roth of “Portnoy” is younger and works on a smaller scale, but with the same outspoken and unshakable confidence that guides him throughout his career.
The novel is a manic, non-traditional sex romp through sixties-era New York with Alexander Portnoy, public servant and nymphomaniac, at the helm. Portnoy hails from a Jewish family in Newark, N.J. (where else?), which is likely the most overprotective family in the universe. Alex’s parents steadfastly refuse to consider him, at thirty-three, a mature and responsible human being. Naturally, Roth renders the often-hilarious familial drama of Alex’s childhood—intensified by bathroom shouts from Alex’s chronically constipated father—perfectly. The Portnoy family is completely dysfunctional and constantly bickering: Sophie Portnoy—Alex’s mother—switches from assault to astonished and betrayed meekness at the drop of a hat; both parents cry many, many tears at the horror of having “such an ungrateful son.” Alex as a teenager, is, of course, simultaneously grateful and ungrateful, and while we so often wish Sophie would just shut up, Roth meticulously avoids turning his exaggeratedly smothering mothering into farce.
The tone of the novel, however, teeters on the edge of disbelief. The title refers to an actual verbal complaint made Alex makes to a psychiatrist, which forms the novel: in other words, the only side of the story we hear for 274 pages is Alex’s more-than-somewhat hysterical one. The force behind the drama is Alex’s relationship with his mother: her unbelievable diligence in restricting his behavior, and his Herculean efforts to dislodge her. Roth links the generational tension to extra-familial issues as well, especially those facing Jews growing up in Christian neighborhoods during the 1940s. Many of Sophie’s edicts seem like the indignant ignorance of a grandmother from the “old country,” until you realize she was born in America and has a high school diploma. In this way, the novel is a fierce criticism of intellectual stagnation, which Roth views as a consequence of the Jewish self-segregation he saw practiced in his childhood, (the Portnoy parents, for example, pride themselves on living in an all-Jewish building) and the stultifying effects of that stagnation on Jewish youth.
But the true genius of this book is how Roth maintains perceptible generality, making unstated claims about the Jewish-American lifestyle, within a plot of vivid and salacious specificity. Alex Portnoy is a symbol, but he is also a comical sex maniac. Roth prefaces the novel with what looks like an entry in a dictionary of medicine, presumably written by the psychiatrist to whom Alex is complaining. The entry is titled “Portnoy’s Complaint;” symptoms of P.C. include: “voyeurism,” “fetishism,” and “oral coitus,” all of which abound in the story as Alex struggles to sort out the Oedipal convolutions of his raging, unstoppable libido.
In the end, “Portnoy’s Complaint” has that mysterious Roth element which makes all his novels so internally consistent and so compulsively readable—all the more exciting because, if you’ve read “American Pastoral” and other masterworks, you can find here the seeds of the ability that blossomed there. In its own right, however, “Portnoy” is a ludicrous and original feast, which will make you smile even through your relief that Sophie Portnoy isn’t your mother.
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