Book review: “Portnoy’s Complaint” by Philip Roth

In the annals of English-language literature, Alexander Portnoy is one of the great characters — larger than life in his sexual obsessions, his anti-Jewish Jewishness, his psychological complexes, his arrogant defensiveness and his defensive arrogance and the sheer stamina of his self-observation.

And he’s very much his own being.

Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse is more than a little foolish in her efforts to run the lives of those around her and, yet, for all that, she comes across as endearing and loveable.  Chaucer’s Wife of Bath is loud and brash and pushy — and fascinating.  Shakespeare’s King Lear is unwise, self-deluding and self-defeating but, at the end of the play and the end of his life, who in the audience doesn’t feel for his humanity, holding the body of his dead faithful daughter?

When it comes to Alexander Portnoy, however, what’s not to dislike?

Or a better question: Can any reader of Philip Roth’s 1969 novel Portnoy’s Complaint dislike the narrator and central character any more than Portnoy himself does?

 

“Self-loathing”

If any word has been attached to him in review after review and commentary after commentary over the past half a century, it’s that he’s “self-loathing.”

And he certainly does find fault with himself in his 250-page monologue, which is seemingly addressed to his shrink Dr. O. Spielvogel but actually, as the final-page PUNCH LINE indicates, is all inside his head.

Throughout the novel, told in six chapters — with titles such as “Whacking Off” and “Cunt Crazy” — Portnoy castigates himself for failing to be the perfect Jewish son and man that his parents thought he would become, given his early promise, intelligence and success at school.

Although it would be better to say that he understands that he has failed to be the perfect Jewish son and man and, in doing so, has disappointed his mother for whom he has mixed feelings.

He may feel guilty about how he has turned out, but not that guilty. Consider, for instance, those chapter headings.

 

Not equally mixed feelings

It is important to recognize that Alex’s mixed feelings for his mother and his father and his Jewish clan aren’t mixed in equal measure.  Yes, there are brief points at which Portnoy recalls moments from his youth when he felt warm and close to his parents and his Jewish neighbors.

Yet, there are many more riffs and screes and psychological sonatas in which the young man (33) is variously flabbergasted, disgusted, oppressed, mystified and ensnared by Sophie Portnoy who, as a teen — Alex has seen her high school yearbook — was just the sort of woman toward whom he now directs his lust.

And is variously flabbergasted, disgusted, oppressed and mystified by his father and all other Jews who, to his mind, are ensnared in the history and culture of their religious faith — and in the history (including the Holocaust) of the goyim reaction to Jews and their way of life.

For every warm and cuddly scene, Alex relates dozens more reflecting his revulsion and repulsion.

 

Self-satisfaction

And it would also be well to recognize that whatever loathing that Alex directs at himself is interwoven with a great deal of self-satisfaction — and his wildly graphic tales of masturbation are only one aspect of that.

There is an element of triumphalism in Portnoy’s stories of being bad, a crowing from the rooftop, the hell with tradition and gossip and the expectations of others.

He does feel sort of guilty about his failure to be the perfect little Jewish man, but, even more, he is proud of everything he does as a big, successful, virile secular man because it is done by him, not in order to fit some familial or religious notion but to fit his own desires.  He is the captain of his ship.

The framework of a therapy session, if only in Alex’s head and not yet in the Doctor’s office, permits Portnoy to pull out all the stops — to speak without fear of being judged, to speak with only himself to weigh, Solomon-like, the rightness or the wrongness of his actions.

And, at bottom, there is nothing Alex does that he’s ashamed of.  At least, not ashamed inside his own head where this entire novel takes place.

Unlike most people, Alex doesn’t operate within the bounds of shame — whether it has to do with his gargantuan appetite for sexual self-gratification or with his rejection of Judaism or with his callous treatment of women to whom he has affairs and attaches demeaning nicknames: The Monkey, the Pilgrim, the Pumpkin.

A shit

Of course, those of us reading Portnoy’s Complaint aren’t actually inside Alex’s head, and, while listening to his thoughts as Roth has laid them on the pages, we’re certainly able to make our own judgements about Alex and his actions and his attitudes.

Many readers, over the past half century and more, have found him to be a shit, to employ the technical term.

Women have long deemed Alex’s creator Roth to be a misogynistic, entitled, powerful white male of the most mindless sort, and Alex is one of the key items of evidence.  Jewish writers have denounced Portnoy as a “self-hating Jew.”  And there is certainly much in the novel to spark outrage in any Christian looking to be outraged.

And men?  I would venture to suggest that many male readers come away from the novel angry that Alex somehow has found a way not only to be free with slaking his sexual hunger on his own and with willing partners but also — even more — has found a way to brag about it. And Portnoy even has a few pages in which he seems to go out of his way to insult gay men while, at the same time, suggesting that his parents should be glad that, against all horrors, he’s not gay.

 

Like Socrates

Yet, as much as Alex Portnoy can seem to be a sex-crazed idiot — or sex-crazed monster or sex-crazed atheistic, degenerate fiend — he has more in common with Socrates than most of us.

When the philosopher was on trial for impiety, he was given the choice to go into exile and separate himself from the Greek philosophers with whom he had debated the meaning of life, or to stay and suffer death.

Rather than give up the ability to freely debate truth and knowledge, Socrates decided to stay, saying, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Say what you will about all the ranting and riffing and wildness of Alex’s thoughts and actions, you have to acknowledge, as his 250-page monologue shows, that Portnoy has been and continues to spend his life examining his life.

And, if the internal debates he’s having with his parents and with his lovers and, most of all, with himself aren’t quite the high-tone discourses that have come down to us from Socrates and the other great Greek thinkers, well, he is a mid-twentieth century American male.

 

Vital and alive

Leave aside judgements about Alex’s madcap sexuality and about his self-centered views of religion and culture and his selfish employment of his hand and the bodies of his lovers — leave all that aside and just look at what Portnoy is doing.

For 250 pages — for something like 350,000 words — Alex is thinking about himself.  He is thinking about what he does and who he is and what it all means.

He is examining his life, just like Socrates.

And that doesn’t mean you have to think of Portnoy as a philosopher. But you do have to think of him as someone vital and alive and fully feeling his body — excuse the pun — fully experiencing his thinking and his actions.

He is alive to his life in a way that few of us are.  Indeed, he is alive to his life in a way that parallels the energy and spirit of Emma Woodhouse, of King Lear, of the Wife of Bath.

He is larger than life because he, unlike most of us, is deeply living his life.

We may not like his choices, but we can’t deny that he is thinking about who he is and what he does and why he does it.

That’s why he’s one of the great characters of literature — and why, long after the shock of his sexual confessions has faded, his examined life will continue to resonate with readers.

 

Patrick T. Reardon

9.5.24