Two trick pony: I'm Jewish! I like sex! It'd be a great novella if it was like fifty pages long. ( )

This is a crazy funny book, and a fairly easy read. Roth's narrator, Alex Portnoy, describes firsthand the layers of neuroses that attach to being raised in a Jewish family. The inescapable and ceaseless siren call of sexuality and the incredibly smothering love of the parents, especially the mother - these two warring forces seem to have created the complicated human being that is Alexander Portnoy. This story reveals an essential distillate of what motivates every young male coming of age - some families experience it more perhaps, and some less. ( )

Although many critics seem to think Portnoy's Complaint is a foundational work in the Philip Roth canon, and although I'm tempted, cetaris paribus, to agree with them, I don't think the book measures up to Roth's later endeavors.

Sure enough, Portnoy is a good piece of writing. There are laugh out loud moments and well crafted, engaging set pieces. The protagonist's trip to Davenport Iowa , being one of the best.

The self-conscious stream of consciousness soap-boxy quality of the prose makes Portnoy mechanically interesting and shows the young Roth developing in an interesting way.

But, in the end, the content of Portnoy strikes me as rather dated and of less enduring interest than later Roth.

Insofar as the "dated-ness" of the novel is concerned, I will be brief. The central complaint is this: Freud is basically bullshit. That several generations of intelligentsia and literary types were ardent Freudians is tragic. Given that "repression", in the technical Freudian sense, is one of the main themes of this novel there's really no way to avoid the feeling of datedness. It's not as though the psychiatric couch presentation of the book is *just* some elaborate dues ex machina, as, perhaps, might be found in a novel that assumes the existence of witches or the truth of phrenology as a means of making a deeper point. No, Freud is the main course in Portnoy, and its point, at least as I read it, has been marinated in ids, egos, and the presupposition that ole' Sigmund had solved (QED) the outstanding problems of the mind.

The second of Portnoy's main problems is a narrowness of scope. It's *too* autobiographical. What makes much of Roth's later work so much better, so much more interesting and powerful, is that he is able to take the autobiographical themes found in Portnoy (being Jewish in a Goyish world, baffling masturbatory obsessions, Newark during the second world war, etc) and integrate them seamlessly into stories with a wider scope. American Pastoral, for example, covers all the same old ground, but also makes perceptive judgments about the situation of a whole generation of people and perhaps about our historical situation in post-60s America.

Although I *was* born in Newark, not having had an overbearing Jewish mother, a browbeaten Jewish father, a libido that functions as an override switch for all others facets of life, and a set of reckless desires born of such a libido, I find myself unable to relate to Portnoy on any deep level. ( )

Disturbing and discomfiting at times, but I have to give props to any book that actually makes me laugh out loud. The ending is a little weak, but even after all this time, it's amazing how fresh and surprising Portnoy's voice is, how brutally honest his analysis of family life. I'm still trying to make sense of the fact that this was once a nationwide bestseller... does that mean that every jew in America read it? Or has it been read by non-jews? And if so, what on earth did they make of it? ( )

This is one book I couldn't finish. Call me old fashioned or whatever, but there was just to much bad language (swear words). ( )