Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). Content and Description

After publishing two tepidly received books, Roth composed Portnoy’s Complaint under the pressure to live up to the promise of his first collection of fiction. With the publication of his third full-length novel, Roth not only exceeded the critical expectations set up by Goodbye, Columbus but also scandalized a whole new sector of the American reading public. The title is indicative of the relationship at the heart of this novel: that of a patient and his psychoanalyst. As Roth defines it, “Portnoy’s Complaint” is “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 1).

Beginning from this pseudomedical diagnosis, Roth’s novel is structured as the neurotic patient Alexander Portnoy’s monologue, one that explores his competing impulses. Portnoy’s Complaint is a dramatic set piece, an interwoven series of scenes that touch on the significant developments in its narrator’s life. The scenes are thematically joined by their capacity to illustrate the tenet at the heart of Roth’s 1969 novel: that good Jewish boys like Portnoy find their every primordial sexual urge unmoored by their desire to remain good Jewish boys. In some ways Portnoy’s Complaint is a bil- dungsroman, or coming-of-age novel: He provides glimpses into the development of young Portnoy’s consciousness and describes the psychic purging necessary before he can truly “begin” his life.

Portnoy’s Complaint famously begins with the narrator’s description of his relationship with his Jewish mother. From kindergarten onward, Alex marvels at her ability to be everywhere and see everything her young son is doing, functioning as the “superego” that keeps young Alex’s roiling “id” in check. Using this Jewish mother figure as a starting point, Roth returns to the theme of Jewish identity that structured Goodbye, Columbus (and that he had abandoned in his subsequent novels), dealing particularly with the assertion that Jews like Alex’s parents divide the world between Jews and non-Jews. Alex claims that his parents’ entire worldview is circumscribed by their ethnic and religious identity.

The most striking aspect of Portnoy’s Complaint, however, is the candid sexual nature of Roth’s tale. Alex’s adolescence is spent masturbating and fantasizing. In one particularly memorable scene, he masturbates with a side of beef. In another, his sister’s bra is transformed into an erotic fetish. Portnoy spends his youth lusting after unattainable blond-haired shiksas and his adult years attempting to convince women of every conceivable ethnicity to engage in sexual activity with him. It becomes increasingly clear as the novel progresses that these women are less human beings than tropes for Portnoy and, by extension, for Roth and America. Portnoy confesses to his psychiatrist: “I don’t seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their back- grounds—as though through fucking I will discover America. Conquer America—maybe that’s more like it. Columbus, Captain Smith, Governor Winthrop, General Washington—now Portnoy.”

With the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth came under fire from both Jewish groups and readers uncomfortable with his representation of male sexuality run amok. He also drew the ire of many women, who were distressed at the depiction of women in the novel. From his dysfunctional but sexually insatiable lover “the Monkey,” who critics contend is yet another variation on Roth’s first wife, to “the Pumpkin” and “the Pilgrim,” college-era conquests who demonstrate his ability to take on American “Supergoys,” Portnoy’s women are stereotypes who aid in their narcissistic lover’s pursuit of sexual freedom.

Despite its detractors, however, many hailed Portnoy’s Complaint as a masterpiece. As did his literary antecedent Saul Bellow, who distinguished himself by breaking free of literary and linguistic constraints in The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Roth let loose his irrepressible narrative voice in Portnoy’s Complaint and forever cemented his reputation as a great American writer.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Roth uses a number of psychoanalytic terms in Portnoy’s Complaint. Look in an online dictionary of psychoanalytic terms or check a reference volume in the library. How do these terms— particularly the id, ego, superego, and castration complex—function in Roth’s 1969 novel? How do they structure both the life of Alexander Portnoy (via the many developmental epochs Roth describes) and the novel itself?

2. It can easily be said that Portnoy’s Complaint both anticipates and epitomizes the sexual revolution that would sweep America during the late 1960s and 1970s. Contrast the depiction of sexuality in the novel with Roth’s earlier representation of sexual mores in Goodbye, Columbus. How do the changes in Roth’s portrayal of sexuality in these two works mark historical and cultural shifts?

3. Many critics, particularly feminist critics, have remarked upon Roth’s portrayal of women in Portnoy’s Complaint. From Alexander Portnoy’s mother to his perverse companions “the Monkey” and “the Pilgrim,” the women of Roth’s novel are often figured as overbearing, sexually insatiable, or otherwise dysfunctional. How can we read Portnoy’s Complaint alongside the precepts of the feminist movement that was gathering steam at the time Roth was writing his novel?

4. How does masculinity, or anxiety over masculinity, function in Roth’s novel? While Portnoy’s relationship to his mother overshadows much of the novel, it is from his relationship to his father, the itinerant salesman, that young Alex gathers his concept of a particularly Jewish brand of masculinity. What do you make of the scene between father and son in the steam room and the emphasis placed on the Portnoy paterfamilias’s constipation? In Patrimony, Roth’s memoir of his relationship with his father, he expresses ambivalence about the model of masculinity offered by Herman Roth in a manner similar to that expressed by Alexander Portnoy about his father. Compare the father-son relationships in these two books, one ostensibly fictional and the other autobiographical.

5. In Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth returns to a theme he had abandoned after the success of his Jewish-themed Goodbye, Columbus: the complexity and anxieties of Jewish identity in postwar America. Early on in the novel, Portnoy contends that his parents understand the world through the binary opposition between Jews and “Goys” (all non-Jews). Although the budding sexual adventurer tries to slough off these distinctions to embrace his universal “humanity,” he still views the world through much the same lens as his parents, but with wildly different results. How does the distinction between Jews and gentiles structure Portnoy’s Complaint? What is Portnoy’s relationship to his Jewishness?

6. Portnoy’s Complaint was published five years after Saul Bellow’s celebrated novel of a tortured intellectual, Herzog. How does Herzog compare to Portnoy? Why do both Bellow and Roth provide their readers a glimpse into the landscape of postwar Jewish America through the psyche of an individual? What can we make of this focus on the guilt-ridden Jewish male intellectual in the works of Bellow and Roth?