Hundred Book Challenge #21: "Portnoy's Complaint" by Philip Roth

“Portnoy’s Complaint” has been called one of the dirtiest books ever written. I don’t know if I buy that. Not just because I’m still smelling the stink of “The Naked Lunch” but because “Portnoy’s Complaint,” while it does reel with explicit scenes, isn’t really about sex or sexuality- and the scenes are far from sexy.

To quote The Beatles, it’s a dirty story of a dirty man. A sad story of a sad man. A repressed story of a repressed man. For all its explicitness it’s a sad and lonely book.

Told as a monologue to a therapist, this book is an attempt to tell the story of a repressed Jew during the sexual revolution of the 60s. Using sex as a story telling tool, it explores the themes of America. What it means to be American and what it means to live in America as an outsider.

Take, for instance, this quote:

“Don’t tell me we’re just as good as anybody else, don’t tell me we’re Americans just like they are. No, no, these blond-haired Christians are the legitimate residents and owners of this place and they can pump any song they want into the streets and no one is going to stop them either.”

Or this:

“Shame and shame and shame and shame- every place I turn something else to be ashamed of.”

It’s a book aching with truth. Much like the graphic novel “Maus” by Art Spiegelman, the book also looks at the generation of Jewish people living in the shadow of their parents post WWII. Because that generation had to deal with the Nazis they have an automatic superiority that doesn’t necessarily match up with their own personalities or lifestyles. It all gels together nicely and humorously into a story about a man who rebels against his parents even while being completely controlled by them. He is desperate to be a “real” American while hating America. He wants to understand Judaism but the only god he worships is Freud.

I say humorously cautiously. It is a funny book but it’s a dark and sad funny.

His inability to come to terms with his own Jewishness crescendos in a section that sums up the tone of the book quite well. Throughout the book, Portnoy says he has sex with women not to get physical pleasure but to try and be a part of their whole lifestyle and history. In other words, to become more American. Near the end of the book he travels to Israel and tries to have sex with an Israeli activist but finds himself impotent.

Get it?  

Moving on. I’ve finished reading “Money” and have started reading “The Man Who Loved Children” and “To the Lighthouse.”