Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
"Portnoy's Complaint," written by Philip Roth, is a groundbreaking novel that explores the complexities of Jewish identity and the intricacies of family dynamics through the life of its protagonist, Alexander Portnoy. Growing up in a lower-middle-class Jewish household in Newark, New Jersey, Portnoy grapples with the challenges of an emotionally charged home environment, particularly the overbearing nature of his mother and the passive role of his father. He seeks therapy from Dr. Spielvogel, where he recounts humorous yet poignant anecdotes about his struggles with sexuality, assimilation, and familial obligations.
The novel delves into Portnoy's attempts to reconcile his desires with the expectations imposed by his upbringing, leading to his neurotic behavior and a series of tumultuous romantic relationships with women from diverse backgrounds. Roth uses Portnoy's encounters to highlight cultural contrasts and self-identity crises, particularly as Portnoy navigates his attraction to gentile women while feeling disconnected from his own heritage. The narrative is marked by a blend of humor and tragedy, ultimately culminating in Portnoy's exploration of his own self-worth and identity.
"Portnoy's Complaint" is both a critique and a celebration of the immigrant experience, and it invites readers to reflect on the significance of cultural heritage and personal freedom. The novel's candid discussions of sexuality and psychological introspection have made it a controversial yet essential work in American literature.
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
First published: 1969
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Bildungsroman
Time of plot: Mid-twentieth century
Locale: Newark, New Jersey
Principal Characters
Alexander Portnoy , the protagonistSophie Portnoy , his motherJack Portnoy , his fatherMary Jane Reed , the MonkeyKay Campbell , the PumpkinSarah Abbott Maulsby , the PilgrimNaomi , an Israeli soldier
The Story
Alexander Portnoy has a very difficult childhood and young adulthood growing up in a lower-middle-class Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey. Part of his problem is his emotionally overcharged home environment; another part is the conflict between his desire to be a dutiful son and his wish to enjoy life to the utmost as a fully assimilated American. As a result he becomes highly neurotic and seeks therapy from a psychiatrist, Dr. Spielvogel, to whom he recounts his experiences.
Portnoy’s mother, Sophie, is an overbearing woman (a stereotypical “Jewish momma”) who torments Alex with demands he hardly knows how to fulfill. His poor, constipated father, Jack, is no help at all in containing Sophie’s dictatorial control of the household. Neither is Alex’s sister, Hannah, who plays only a shadowy role in Alex’s descriptions of the family. For example, throughout his boyhood and into later life, Portnoy could never understand what it was that he did as a little boy that made his mother lock him outside their apartment door. What crime had he committed? Try as he would to please her, at least once a month he finds himself locked outside, vainly hammering on the door and pleading to be allowed back inside.
As he enters puberty, Portnoy’s sex drive goes into high gear. Some of the most hilarious occasions he recalls for his psychiatrist involve masturbation and an early, futile attempt to have sex with a local teenager, Bubbles Girardi, that ends with his ejaculation into his own eye. He then has the fantasy of becoming blind and returning home with a seeing-eye dog, which his mother would not permit in the house. In this episode Portnoy shows how the melodrama he repeatedly experiences at home influences his rich fantasy life as well. Whether it is polio season or Alex indulging himself by eating french fries with his friend, Melvin Weiner, anything and everything becomes an occasion for hysteria and melodrama in the Portnoy household.
Although fantasy is a large part of his life, Portnoy’s “adventures” are real enough. As a college student, he takes up with Kay Campbell, whom he nicknames the Pumpkin because of her complexion and physique but who is otherwise an “exemplary” person. She represents for Portnoy the liberal, high-minded, worthy Protestant female he thinks he will someday marry. When he goes home with her to Iowa for Thanksgiving, he finds her family to be as different from his own as could possibly be imagined. The Campbells never raise their voices, and their dinner table is a model of decorum. Portnoy is so thrilled to be their “weekend guest” that he can only reply with a polite “thank you” to anything anyone says; he even speaks thus to inanimate objects, including a chair he accidentally bumps into.
The college romance with Kay ends when Alex casually suggests that when they get married Kay could convert to Judaism, and she indicates that she will not do so—not that Alex is a seriously observant Jew: Following his bar mitzvah, he stubbornly refuses to attend even High Holiday services, the pleas of his family notwithstanding. Alex’s attraction to gentile women—shiksas—however, is a recurring part of his problems of adjustment. After the Pumpkin and college, he takes up with Sarah Abbott Maulsby, the Pilgrim, so-called because of her family origins. That romance ends when Alex realizes he could never marry the “beautiful and adoring girl” because their backgrounds, even the expressions they use, are so different. Moreover, Portnoy recognizes that a major part of Sarah’s attraction—and the attraction of others like her—is not her self but her heritage, which he is desperately and vainly trying to assimilate into his own—or to take revenge upon because he could not.
Things seem somewhat different with Mary Jane Reed, the Monkey, a nickname she acquired after she ate a banana while another couple had intercourse. A New York model, Mary Jane was born and reared in the hills of West Virginia. Although she seems to satisfy Portnoy’s grandest sexual fantasies and encourage others, he still regards her as essentially an uneducated hillbilly, which in important respects she is. By this time Portnoy has an important job as the assistant commissioner for human opportunity in New York, and unknown to many, his private life and his professional life are at odds with each other. As Alex tries to educate Mary Jane, she falls deeply in love with him, regarding him as her “breakthrough” to a new and different kind of life from the one she has hitherto led. She nicknames him Breakie, and for a brief while—as when they spend a weekend in a quaint New England village inn—he fantasizes that they might indeed become a couple. Afterward, however, during a trip to Europe, when they have sex together with a Roman prostitute, they quarrel bitterly, and the affair comes to an abrupt halt.
Continuing his trip alone, Alex goes to Israel, where he gets his serious comeuppance. Trying to seduce a very attractive sabra (a native-born Israeli) in her army uniform, he is physically and emotionally humiliated by her. Naomi is having none of it—none of Alex’s coarse sexual advances, none of his “ghetto humor” or his self-deprecating, self-mocking attitude, and especially none of the corrupt values he had developed by living in the diaspora. To her, he is an utter schlemiel (chump), as indeed he is without fully realizing it.
After all this, Alex finally undertakes an extended series of sessions on Dr. Spielvogel’s couch, from where he tells his tales of self-pity and self-torture. The novel ends with the doctor's ironic words, “So. Now vee may perhaps to begin.”
Bibliography
Avishai, Bernard. Promiscuous: Portnoy's Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness. New Haven: Yale UP, 2012. Print.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2004. Print.
Brauner, David. “'Getting in Your Retaliation First’: Narrative Strategies in Portnoy’s Complaint.” Philip Roth: New Perspectives on an American Author. Ed. Derek Parker Royal. Westport: Praeger, 2005. Print.
Cohen, Sarah Blacher. “Philip Roth’s Would-Be Patriarchs and Their Shikses and Shrews.” Studies in American Jewish Literature 1 (Spring, 1975): 16–23. Repr. Critical Essays on Philip Roth. Ed. Sanford Pinsker. Boston: Hall, 1982. Print.
Grebstein, Sheldon. “The Comic Anatomy of Portnoy’s Complaint.” Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature. Ed. Sarah Blacher Cohen. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1978. Print.
Guttmann, Allen. The Jewish Writer in America: Assimilation and the Crisis of Identity. New York: Oxford UP, 1971. Print.
Halio, Jay L. Philip Roth Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1992. Print.
Israel, Jeffrey I. "Why Portnoy's Complaint Matters." Social Research 79.1 (2012): 247–70. Print.
Parrish, Timothy, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Philip Roth. New York: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print.