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'Enough being a nice Jewish boy. . . Let’s put the id back in yid”—Alex Portnoy

Portnoy's Complaint: "A disorder in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature."

I have had a couple intense years of reading Roth, rereading some, but mostly reading much I had not read. Recently Roth died, RIP, and then I read his last four short books, and decided to come full circle back to my (I think it was) first and possibly the most read of his books, Portnoy’s Complaint, which reads almost as if it were a joyous comic farce. As with many other of his books, it begins with a male boy character, Alex, who struggles mightily with his Jewish Newark working class identity, and since he is a teenager, specifically with his parents. Roth, as with most of his other books, does not hide his character’s sexual life; instead he celebrates (and then analyzes, and sometimes problematizes) it in all its Rabelaisian glory.

Portnoy’s Complaint is sort of known as the Great American Novel of Teenaged Masturbation. In this book, Alex Portnoy is not at 14 having sex, but he calls himself “the Raskolnikov of jerking off,�� and this is how the book comically opens, focusing on this. There is, later, a lot of sex in the book, usually related humorously—and for the time, but probably still now, for many, shockingly—explicit and what people used to call “foul-mouthed,�� but it is clear his more serious subject is what it means to be Jewish in America; while making fun of himself he also satirizes his fellow Jews, sometimes brutally. The sex-obsessed Portnoy is in this tale confessing to his analyst; he is trying to figure out how to be Jewish (or not) in America, exploring these issues through the various women—Jews, gentiles—he is with. The joy of sex, the joys and madness of Jewish life, and atheism, all three topics are persistent themes in Roth across most of his work, and are here from the very first.

It is 1969, and Portnoy’s Complaint emerges after 2-3 fairly tame books from Roth (in comparison, on the explicitness scale) that build his literary reputation, and then this famously “dirty book�� explodes (pun intended, sorry) on to the literary scene getting him denounced by Jewish leaders and community, becomeing an instant bestseller and critical smash. The world, or at least America, is going through a sexual revolution: Freedom, man, stop getting hung up on all this religious repression and just Let Go. Love the one you’re with! Alex was a top student, and is, at the time is telling the tale to his therapist, 33, a good liberal, working for Mayor John Lindsay, but is still lost, personally. He struggles, especially in his relationships with women: How can such a (once) good Jewish boy like him get so screwed up?! Maybe it's the endless screwing?

The book tacks back and forth between Alex the masturbator at 14 and Alex the sadly, madly lost sexual libertine at 33, a case of arrested development, one of many many Roth books that would seem to take a look at sex and mortality and cultural identity. To be sexual is for Roth (or is it just many of his main male characters?) to be fully alive—while to have that denied is a form of living death. And yet it sometimes seems to be killing him, even as he obsesses about what it means to be Jewish, and an atheist, in America.

The book begins with a funny look at Alex’s upbringing by a set of neurotic Jewish parents—domineering mother Sophie, nebbish father—where the only thing he seems to have control over is his penis. Fast forward to age 33 where he is alone, childless, serial dating various goyish blond women. He seems to want to rid himself of his Jewish identity! But then, in Davenport, Iowa, he discovers his discomfort with Midwestern Christian America, too, as he visits his girlfriend’s family over the holidays. He doesn't want that life, either. Later in the book he pursues an Israeli Jew; will it be better in Israel, with a “real Jew��? Nope! It’s like a dialectical narrative, going back in forth between being anguished over his cultural background, not wanting to be a traditional Jew, and not wanting to be mistreated as a Jew. But remember, this is—like Salinger’s Catcher—a therapy session, so we are not supposed to see this solely as an affirmation of Alex. Alex is sex crazy, at 33, and all around pretty crazy.

Portnoy’s Complaint I thought was still very funny, in my second reading of it decades later, though it may have been knocked down a peg from my list of Roth’s absolute greats such as the American trilogy (though still I would say it is in the top seven or eight), but it is a manic, often hilarious, sometimes tiring series of rants (interspersed with comic Yiddishisms), a monologue, a confession from a seemingly arrogant, sometimes clearly self-deprecating, lost soul, creating one of the great literary characters of the twentieth century, still a source of shock and outrage and humor; still a “dirty book�� and very much a literary accomplishment.