Portnoy's Complaint

"Portnoy’s Complaint reflects Roth’s engagement with psychotherapy during the mid-sixties and the breakup of his first marriage. Roth discovered that he could use his struggle for self-understanding as the subject matter of a novel entwined with satire. It was a literary breakthrough. In the 1960s, a lot of novels dealt with psychoanalysis but what Roth linked it to was outrageous comedy. Roth was also ready to knock down the door of gentility in American literature . Masturbation was not written about during the postwar period and yet, there it was on the page. Reviews said, ‘this is so outrageous, this is so obscene that you have to read it to believe it.’ And everybody wanted to read it. So, Portnoy’s Complaint was a breakout book. It made him a great literary success and financially secure but, at the same time, it was a burden. He became so famous that people would yell at him on the streets of New York . He couldn’t escape being the Philip Roth of Portnoy’s Complaint . He turned to less intimate, shorter work—like Our Gang , the satire of Nixon—before he regained his footing as a writer. Philip Roth put his private life on the page. He changed the names of some characters, and sometimes he didn’t. In The Plot Against America , the young boy telling the story is named Philip and the parents are called Herman and Bess, the name of Roth’s parents. Roth looked in the mirror. He often didn’t like what he saw there, but he wrote about it. He confronted it; he didn’t disguise it and he didn’t hide from it. Throughout his life, he drew from who he was at different stages of his emotional, psychological, and sexual development. Once he wrote Portnoy’s Complaint , he wasn’t afraid of who he was. He wasn’t afraid of naked truths, so he would write about American history and all its contradictions. He would write about political correctness in The Human Stain and a possible Nazi takeover of America and threats to American Jewish life in The Plot Against America . He took on what was uncomfortable."

"The paradigmatic novel of New Jersey for me is Portnoy’s Complaint. In fact I write about it in the Calcutta book. It sets up the basic problem of immigrants – the failure to assimilate into a normal American life because the past keeps sabotaging you. In Portnoy , as in most Roth novels, that past is the Jewish world of Newark, and the doomed and absurd attempts to recover it, in Israel, through sexual conquest, through therapy, and so on. Once you leave you mini community in Newark, and become a liberal individual, an American (and in the Jewish case, for the first time, “white”) you become utterly alone, homeless. No alternate collective life awaits you on the other side of assimilation, no place that you can call home. Out of the ghetto and into the abyss. It’s this central problematic of even the successful trajectory of American immigrants that is Roth’s great subject. And even though this is ostensibly a book about Calcutta, I think I also write on the same subject, mining the same things. “The writing life is mainly about sitting alone in a room, butt in your seat, day after day, week after week, month after month” The failure to emerge out of the abyss is a political failure. The other thing about Roth is that he understood the relationship between politics and the individual, that politics was not about belief or your inner life – that’s faith. Politics is about how you organise your public life, your public self in the world with others, what kind of world you try to make. You may fail, you may be completely flummoxed, but this project is what still drove Jews in Roth’s childhood to fight at dinner tables, what drives the daughter of the great assimilated hero, Swede Levov, to 1960s radicalism. Roth understood the relationship between the individual and the political from childhood experience in a way that the next generation of American writers, raised in suburbs, often do not. From Aristotle’s time onwards, the polis – the city – and politics are connected. The failure to produce a new city, a new society in the utopia of suburban assimilation is a failure not only of urban planning or social organisation but of the political imagination."