Portnoy's Complaint
A man talking at his analyst for an entire novel, and the analyst answering only in the final line.
A disorder in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature.
The novel takes the form of one long spoken monologue: Alexander Portnoy, a Jewish man from Newark, addresses his psychoanalyst across the length of the book, and the analytic session becomes its entire structure. Roth writes free association as narrative, so the reader follows a patient who circles, boasts, confesses, and then retreats from what he has just admitted.
The material is guilt, the grip of the mother, appetite treated as symptom, and the pull toward telling everything to a listener who says almost nothing. Portnoy narrates his childhood, his family, and a sexuality he experiences as compulsion and shame at once, always with an ear on how it sounds to the man behind him.
Published in 1969, the book stages the pressure of the couch as comedy and as suffering. The analyst holds his silence until one closing line, which reframes everything that came before as the start of the work.
About the author
Philip Roth
Philip Roth (1933 to 2018) was an American novelist whose career spanned more than five decades. Born in Newark, New Jersey, he wrote fiction that examined American Jewish life, identity, desire, and mortality. He gained wide attention with Portnoy's Complaint in 1969 and later won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. Across many novels he created the recurring character Nathan Zuckerman, an author whose life mirrored and refracted his own. Roth died in New York in 2018.
Details
- 1969
- Vintage
- Vintage
- 288
- 9780679756453