Portnoy’s Complaint was my first time. I read it when I was 17 and I can still remember the outlaw sensation. This was a best-seller? This was literary fiction! Wow!

Today, this famous/infamous book is still as funny, obscene, and obscenely funny as any book I’ve ever read. Terry Southern, in his Blue Movie, could only ape Roth’s tropes, but not his savage energy or laughoutloud uproariousness.

Alexander Portnoy is Jewish, sex-addled, and beset by controlling parents who would deprive him of any and all of life’s little pleasures, from French Fries to masturbation. His story, a monologue, told to his shrink, is, as is most of Roth’s fiction, a rant against the absurd and the unfair and, most importantly, the unfree.

If you’re easily offended, stop reading, because (quoting from the book at hand being one of the regular features of this column) it’s virtually impossible to quote something representative, and funny, from Portnoy’s Complaint without it referring to sex. Here goes.

It was at the end of my freshman year of high school — and freshman year of masturbating — that I discovered on the underside of my penis, just where the shaft meets the head, a little discolored dot that has since been diagnosed as a freckle. Cancer. I had given myself cancer. All that pulling and tugging at my own flesh, all that friction, had given me an incurable disease. And not yet fourteen! In bed at night the tears rolled from my eyes. “No!” I sobbed. “I don’t want to die! Please — no!” But then, because I would very shortly be a corpse anyway, I went ahead as usual and jerked off into my sock. I had taken to carrying dirty socks into bed with me at night so as to be able to use one as a receptacle upon retiring, and the other upon awakening.

Later, as an adult, Portnoy meets The Monkey, a woman whose sexual adventurousness matches his own. Or, so he thinks. Ultimately, The Monkey wishes only to please and even takes part in a menage a trois at Portnoy’s insistence. But even that isn’t enough to bind him to her, and she eventually leaves.

Portnoy’s complaint is that he ultimately derives no satisfaction from sex, and, even worse, his preoccupation with sex is what thwarts him in achieving a meaningful, emotional connection with women. His inability, at the end of the book, to achieve an erection, let alone a relationship, with a strong Jewish female in Israel, is funny retribution for his past degrading mistreatment of women.

No one writes books like Portnoy’s Complaint any more. Novels of such sexual frankness are published infrequently (though a steady stream of vivid sexual memoirs have been published in the last decade), and the last really funny novel about sex I can think of was also by Philip Roth, one of his masterpieces, Sabbath’s Theater.

Now Read This! appears once a month on Monday. Learn about all the great books you wish you’d read. Then read them.

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Christopher Guerin

Christopher Guerin is the author of two books each of poetry and short fiction, a novel, and more than a dozen children’s books. If he hadn’t spent 26 years as an arts administrator, including 20 years as President of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, perhaps he’d have worked a little harder getting them published. His consolation resides in his fiction and poems having been published in numerous small magazines, including Rosebud, AURA, Williams and Mary Review, Midwest Quarterly, Wittenberg Review, RE: Artes Liberales, DEROS, Wind, and Wind less Orchard. His blog, Zealotry of Guerin, features his fiction and poetry, including his sonnet sequence of poems after paintings, “Brushwork." He is the V.P. of Corporate Communications at Sweetwater Sound, Inc., the national music instrument retailer.

Latest posts by Christopher Guerin (Posts)

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