Portnoy's Complaint

The Complaint

Alexander Portnoy is thirty-three years old, Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity for the City of New York, and in psychoanalysis. Portnoy’s Complaint is his monologue — everything he has to say to Dr Spielvogel, delivered at once, without interruption, at full volume. It covers his childhood in Newark, his mother (Sophie Portnoy, whose presence in the novel is one of the great achievements of American comic fiction), his father’s constipation, his masturbation (frequent, varied, specific), his romantic history with Gentile women he cannot love as they are and cannot stop pursuing, and his extended guilt about all of it.

The novel was a sensation when published in 1969 — it sold 400,000 copies in its first year, was condemned from pulpits and in Jewish community organizations, and made Roth both famous and reviled. The scandal now seems dated (the content would barely register), but the novel itself has aged well because the comedy and the psychology are genuinely excellent rather than merely provocative.

What It Is Actually About

The complaint the title refers to is Portnoy’s specific psychic condition: the conflict between the person his Jewish community formed him to be — dutiful son, good Jewish boy, embodiment of parental sacrifice — and the person he actually is, or wants to be. The joke is that the conflict is unresolvable and that Portnoy knows it, and the comedy is his total inability to stop performing it anyway.

The final line, delivered after three hundred pages of uninterrupted monologue, is one of the great endings in American comedy.

Reading Guides

• American Pastoral by Philip Roth — Full Review

Sophie Portnoy

The mother is the novel’s greatest creation and its most enduring. Sophie Portnoy — overprotective, omnipresent, convinced that her every act of love is also an act of potential devastation — is funny in the specific way that only portraits of recognisable types can be funny: the reader who has encountered this kind of maternal intensity will find the comedy exact and the horror genuine in equal measure. Roth draws her with enormous affection alongside the savage comedy. She is not a villain. She is a woman who loves her son with a completeness that has no concept of limit, in a community whose entire cultural grammar was organised around the proposition that the Jewish mother’s sacrifice was the foundation of the Jewish future. The pathology Roth anatomises is not Sophie’s alone; it is a cultural formation that her generation inherited and transmitted.

The specific texture of her intrusions — the monitoring of food, the monitoring of health, the monitoring of social performance, the terror that something will go wrong if she looks away for a moment — is rendered with a comedic precision that requires intimate familiarity with the original. Roth had it. The Newark Jewish community of his childhood provided the material, and his genius was to find the form — the psychoanalytic monologue — that could accommodate both the rage and the love simultaneously.

The Monologue Form

The formal choice of Portnoy’s Complaint is its most important structural decision and the one most easily overlooked in discussions of its content. The novel is a monologue delivered to a psychoanalyst who never speaks — Dr. Spielvogel appears in the foreword and in the novel’s final line, but throughout Portnoy’s three hundred pages of confession he is silent. This silence is essential. It gives Portnoy the freedom to range without consequence, to contradict himself, to accuse and forgive and re-accuse without the friction of another consciousness pushing back. It also means that everything we know comes from a single, unreliable, compulsively self-dramatising perspective, and the novel’s comedy depends on the reader’s awareness of that unreliability.

The psychoanalytic frame was not merely formal but historical: by 1969 psychoanalysis had become, in the Jewish-American professional middle class, something close to a secular religion. The language of drives, defences, and unconscious motivations had been absorbed into the vernacular. Roth uses this frame to comic effect — Portnoy knows the vocabulary of his own dysfunction and deploys it fluently without being able to do anything about the dysfunction itself — and to structural effect: the monologue is simultaneously a session, a confession, a performance, and a cry for help.

Newark and Jewish-American Identity

Philip Roth (1933–2018) was born in Newark, New Jersey, the son of an insurance company employee, and Newark’s Weequahic neighbourhood — its specific geography, its Jewish-American community, its particular mixture of aspiration and anxiety — provided the material for much of his career. Portnoy’s Complaint is the most exuberant version of this material: the comedy of a community that has made it into the professional middle class and is now discovering that success does not dissolve the guilt and the self-consciousness that the immigrant generation’s anxiety produced.

The novel’s treatment of Jewish identity is both loving and merciless. Roth did not write from outside his community — he wrote from deep inside it, which is why the comedy landed so precisely and why the community’s response was so fierce. The Jewish organizations that condemned the novel in 1969 were not wrong that it depicted Jewish-American life with unflattering accuracy; they were wrong to think this was a problem rather than an achievement.

The Final Line

The novel’s final line — Dr. Spielvogel’s sole contribution to three hundred pages of monologue — is one of the great endings in American comedy: “So. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” After everything Portnoy has said, the analyst suggests they are only now ready to start. The joke is also the truth: the monologue has been a performance of the problem, not a solution to it. Portnoy has talked brilliantly and at great length about everything he cannot change. The comedy and the despair are identical. Roth won the National Book Award for Goodbye, Columbus in 1960 and would win it again for Sabbath’s Theater in 1995 and the Pulitzer for American Pastoral in 1998; Portnoy’s Complaint is the novel that made him famous, infamous, and permanently essential.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Roth at his most comic and his most naked: still funny, still uncomfortable, still exact about a specific kind of American Jewish suffering that has not become less recognizable with time.