this is a short reflection on a class I took in twelth grade, I am tempted to edit this to include some of my long rants(for instance, the fact that there was an entire chapter called “Beating off,” the time he had sex with a piece of liver or the degrading sexaul terms used on his girlfriend, like calling her “the monkey”)

Henry Belman

World Jewish Literature

December, 2017

Kehillah Jewish High School

Independent Reading Project 

Philip Roth’s controversial novel Portnoy’s Complaint is a well written but often perverse read. It explores Alex Portnoy’s crisis of identity and struggle with the two contradicting sides of himself: the well educated, champion of the people, pride of his parents side, and the sex obsessed, perverted, narcissist, and generally freudian side. The book appears to be a love letter to psychologist Sigmund Freud, thanks to its embracing so many of his ideas, such as all problems in life stemming from sexaul problems in the childhood. The whole book is a monolog to a psychiatrist, but at points, the plot almost seems over the top Freudian, what with the oedipus complex, the penis envy with his own dad, the constant mastribation, and the amount it has affected him during his life.  

There were two key themes within Portnoy’s Complaint that deeply affected me. His struggle with his identity both as a jew and as a person, and portnoy’s obsession with sex and constant mastribation. His crisis of identity is deeply interesting and is consistent throughout the book, but the graphic descriptions of his sexaul extipade, specificaly mastribation are sickining and made me uncomfortable reading it at school. The writing was good and I know it is a bit immature of me to be so squeemish about the disgusting sexaul stuff but I cannot help it. The writing of the book is just as juxtiposialy as its main character, with an even balance between the witty, the yiddish and well educated, and the smutty, self hating and antisemitism. Just like Portnoy himself, the book is great academically, but really is not for school. 

In terms of stylle, the writing feels like the exact middle ground between Franz Kafka and Isaac Babel. It feels very psychological, being in my opinion a tribute to Sigmund Freud, but being incredibly graphic in descriptions. The actual themes of Portnoy’s Complaint are a mixture between the fairly common trope of a self-hating Jew with an identity crisis, the identity crisis part coming up in a lot of the poetry and in the Lispector. The graphic sexaul parts and themes however are not like anything I have ever read in this class. In books I have read in general previous to this, all sex was either implied or given a sentence or paragraph confirming that intercourse had happened. Overall, while Philip Roth is indeed a great author, and Portnoy’s Complaint is an essential piece of jewish literature and far more than some simple pornigraphic psudo-story, the amount of smut in the book proved a little over my head. I would recommend this book to a friend as it is good, but I would warn anyone who reads it of the amount of disgusting and graphic scenes in it first. I do not regret reading this book. I just think I may have not been ready for it.