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This is the book that made Philip Roth both famous and scandalous. Portnoy is a mother-obsessed sexual maniac and actually quite hilarious. Who else would have had his character masturbating with a cow liver other than the author of the equally darkly humorous Sabbath's Theater? This book and the reaction to it drives the Nathan Zuckerman series of books which all refer back to the public reaction with equal measures of awe and dismay. The book itself is a classic and extremely well-written as only Roth can write.

If I were to compare Roth to another onanist-obsesses writer, I’d probably choose France’s Houllebecq who can barely string two paragraphs together before whipping it out. However, Roth is truly able to get inside his characters and make them real, living breathing beings. I found that Houllebecq’s characters lacked any depth or even human understanding. They are just masturbatory cogs in a wheel. The wheel itself is well-described, but it is all so nihilistic and fatalist which is one reason why he is a darling to the extreme right who deplore decadence and think that God or their conceptions of right/wrong should be imposed because given freewill, humans will always be depraved. Roth’s view is less cynical. There is evil in the world, but it comes from conscious choices, and not just from the world’s inherent immorality or some antiquated idea of fate.

RIP (1933-2018). One of America's literary giants has left us.