Portnoy's Complaint

"With a life like mine, Doctor, who needs dreams?"

If any man come to Me and hate not his father and mother, and wife and children, and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.

Luke 14:26

If you are easily offended then give this article a skip. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth pissed people off in 1969 and continues to piss people off to this day. Listen I understand that this is an exaggerated work of fiction but when it came time to draw Portnoy’s sexual eccentricities as a result of his Jewish upbringing people didn’t go haha this is funny and & totally unrelatable it’s like Looney Tunes….what an unrealistic and satiric depiction of a make-believe universe. Woody Allen borrowed a lot from Roth in making Annie Hall but unlike Roth, Woody Allen still wants to be liked. Roth wants to be more like the bug in Kafka’s Metamorphosis beaten back by loved ones with a stick. I think people get pissed off at this novel because it holds a mirror to the reader’s face and makes them question their own motivations. Anything after this will be written in the style of the novel.

Yes, yes, write like no one is watching. Write into the void. Write like mother & father are dead. But to write as if you were trying to kill mother & father, holy shit Philip Roth!

For writing about American Jewish life behind closed doors, this male yenta was considered an anti-semite. Obviously, his brain had been poisoned by the goyim & in desperation to fit in with Gentiles he wrote this smut parody of Jewish culture. The Anti-Defamation League had to get involved….

Philip Roth was born to Jewish parents in 1933 in Newark, New Jersey. He felt that the person should have shame but the writer should have none. That is essentially what Portnoy’s Complaint is about. It is a deathbed rant against the culture & parents who raised him. It is magnificent & brutal & hilarious.

“Come, Big Boy, come” screamed the maddened piece of liver that, in my own insanity, I bought one afternoon at a butcher shop, and believe it or not, violated behind a billboard on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson.

Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint

This Raskolnikov of jerking off tells the story of his trauma which was his upbringing. On one hand, his parents tried to raise him like a proper Jewish middle-class child. On the other hand, their insecurities are mixed in with their desperate wish for a safe life. Every single thing becomes a potential cliff for their lemming of a son to drop off of.

Convertibles. Washing your hands. Diarrhea from eating hamburgers & fries. Your left nut not finding its proper place in your ballsack. If only Alexander Portnoy would listen to his poor mother! Who sacrificed everything to give her son life, who spent her vital energies making sure Portnoy could have the best possible life under the sun. Can’t he see how hard his father works? He has to go to the inner city to sell insurance….sell insurance….to Spanish Speakers and Black People.

Yet as Portnoy points out. Who does his mother actually worship? The great Jewish Rabbi….

Don’t you understand, the synagogue is how he earns his living, and that’s all there is to it. Coming to the hospital to be brilliant about life (syllable by syllable) to people who are shaking in their pajamas about death is his business, just as it is my father’s business to sell life insurance! It is what they each do to earn a living, and if you want to feel pious about somebody, feel pious about my father, God damn it, and bow down to him the way you bow down to that big fat comical son of a bitch, because my father really works his balls off and doesn’t happen to think that he is God’s special assistant into the bargain.

Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint

The only way this novel works is because Philip Roth on some level actually does feel this way & some of the fucked up things he did in the novel—he probably did in real life. The entirety of the work is grounded in his comedy & the setting of Portnoy ranting to his German analyst Dr. Spielvogel. The novel ends with him screaming

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!!!

Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint

The novel begins with a note from Dr. Spielvogel and his discovery of a new mental disorder Portnoy’s Complaint (named after Portnoy) in which strongly felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings. However, it never results in gratification but in feelings of shame & retribution, particularly in the form of castration nightmares. ¹

Can’t they see that Portnoy’s obsession with his penis, is because it is the one thing his mother can’t have control of? It’s why he locks himself in the bathroom with diarrhea sniffing his sister’s bra & panties. Of course, it’s why his mother knocks on the door, to check his stool but Portnoy can’t come to the door because he just shot a fat wad onto the lightbulb and that’s cum dripping off his foot. It’s why he has sex with the family liver before it is served for dinner.

It’s like a Jewish joke, only it isn’t a joke because it’s his life. He is nothing but a ten-year-old with twenty-three years of experience. It’s like a dream but it happens with his eyes open. His mom threatened him with castration, his nut had to be persuaded to descend, he broke a leg chasing shikses, he came in his eye the first time he got a blowjob. Where else does this happen besides in a dream?

And those god damned shiskes. Sure, every woman has a fanny but there is just something sweeter about the forbidden fruit. When his father brings home a Christian woman from work to show her what a proper Jewish meal is like Portnoy’s mind races.

My father….and a shikse? Can’t be. Was beyond his ken. My own father—fucked shikses? I’ll admit under duress that he fucked my mother…but shikses?

Philip Roth
Portnoy’s Complaint

The Jews tell someone to sleep faster because they need the pillows. The Goy does dumb shit like talk to dogs, worship The Pansy Of Palestine who was a Jew, they spray their assholes with pine scent after using the toilet. They say shit like sleep well and good morning. Wishing each other twenty-four hours of health & prosperity!

Is it any wonder that his own love interest is the Monkey (named so because of her desire to eat a banana while watching another couple do it like the Discovery Channel)? A thirty-something-year-old daughter of a coal miner from West Virginia. Who thinks d-i-r is dear and now wants to be a wife & a mother in the same way that an elderly spiritual woman now wants to be called Sacred Heart when she spent her twenties in dive bars being called Bunny. Do you think when Monkey is introduced to the Mayor he thinks this is a relationship based on mutual compatibility and shared….NO! He knows that this man enjoys sport-fucking this kind of woman because it is the exact kind of woman his mother would disapprove of.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhh!

It’s all bullshit, folks. It’s all bullshit and it’s bad for you.

George Carlin

1. Spielvogel, O. The Puzzled Penis. Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV p. 909.