Portnoy's Complaint

The test is subtractive, and the form half licenses the cuts it invites. A complaint to an analyst circles by nature, and the returns to the mother, the father’s bowels, the bread knife and the shiksa are the symptom the book diagnoses; most of the repetition is required. The order is required too: the mother first, then the body’s secret life in “Whacking Off”, then the family as an Oedipal theatre in “The Jewish Blues”, then the women, then the exile to Israel, where the whole apparatus fails. Remove Israel and the book loses its proof that the bind is not a matter of place. What is permitted lies in the middle. The catalogue of three Gentile women, the Pumpkin, the Pilgrim and the Monkey, runs longer than its argument; the Monkey’s chapters repeat their quarrels and their Rome episode past the turn; several tirades restate a grievance already won. Perhaps a sixth of the book is permitted rather than compelled.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A son raised inside a morality of fear, duty and food, by parents themselves humiliated by the America they want for him, can obey neither the conscience he was given nor the appetite he is told is freedom, and his rebellion is scripted by what it rebels against. The dictionary entry states the thesis before the case, “ethical and altruistic impulses” at war with sexual longing, and the book earns it: the father selling insurance for a Protestant company that will never promote him; a Commissioner of Human Opportunity who means to take America through its daughters. It discloses the joke as a way of being, a life lived as a routine its speaker cannot step out of. Held below the bar because much is told by a speaker who is a gifted analyst of himself, and the women stay largely what his appetite makes them; the Monkey’s own suffering is glimpsed, not opened.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The heights are comic, and they come often: the liver bought at the butcher’s, used in secret and then served to the family for dinner; the bus to Newark; Bubbles Girardi; Thanksgiving in Iowa among the Campbells, where the son of Newark hears Gentile politeness as a foreign music; the mother with the bread knife over a boy who will not eat. The transport is real and frequent. The lyric heights are fewer and the more striking for it: the Sunday softball of the fathers, and the boy’s wish to be a center fielder and nothing more, the book’s one vision of a life without guilt; and the end in Israel, the impotence with Naomi and the long printed howl that the analyst’s line cuts off. Terror lies close under the kitchen scenes and is turned to farce. Held at the foot of the eights because the elevation is mostly the elevation of performance, and grandeur is refused by design.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Myth built in part. The Oedipal family is not alluded to but enacted, and comically literalised: the mother as the first teacher in every classroom, the father defeated on the toilet, the son who must betray both to become a man and cannot. The book names Freud in its fifth title and makes the analyst its hidden addressee, so the archetype bears weight as structure. A second pattern is built: Exodus inverted, the son of the diaspora reaching the promised land and failing there, unmanned by a Jewish woman who reproaches him as his mother did. And the book fixed a figure, the Jewish mother, in the common imagination, a mythmaking of type more than of depth. Held below the gate because the Freudian frame often supplies the pattern ready-made, so that myth is diagnosed rather than discovered; the Exodus reversal rests on one section; and the Jewish joke, the book’s other archetype, is a form of a culture’s humour more than a deep structure.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance is the morally serious Jewish American novel of Bellow and Malamud, and Roth’s own first books: Goodbye, Columbus and two Jamesian novels, Letting Go and When She Was Good. Behind it stand Dostoevsky’s underground man, Kafka, Céline and Henry Miller; in the near field, Lenny Bruce’s stage monologue and Bellow’s Herzog (1964), another self-indicting mind in a torrent. The turn was in tone and frankness together: the novel as obscene stand-up confession, sex and masturbation made the comic engine of a serious book, a family and a community exposed in their own idiom. The stake was large, and it was paid. Roth, already attacked for his story “Defender of the Faith”, was charged with self-hatred and with endangering Jews, and the book was banned in places, Australia among them. He gambled a serious reputation on a dirty joke. Held a step from the top because the monologue and the comic confessor were inherited.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and most of the knowledge goes. Told in the third person, this would be a comic novel of manners about a neurotic bachelor. Told as it is, to an analyst who does not answer, the form is the condition: a man who must narrate, justify and accuse without end, who turns every memory into a bit, and who cannot hear himself because he is performing. The section titles parody the forms that could not hold him: a Reader’s Digest feature for the mother, a blues for the family, a title of Freud’s for the Gentile women. The last line reframes the whole: “Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” The confession was a preamble, and the joke is on a speaker who thought he had arrived somewhere. Held a step below the top because inside the monologue the sections are more episodic than formal, and the frame does its deepest work only at the two ends.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Evidence over fifty-seven years, and it is mixed. The book has been read without a break: through the long debate over Jewish self-representation, through psychoanalytic and feminist criticism, and through Roth’s own later answers to it in the Zuckerman books, where a novelist is made notorious by a book called Carnovsky. Its questions stay partly open: how far the book judges its speaker, whether the analyst’s line is a release or a sentence, whether the women are the speaker’s blindness or the author’s. But on return the surface yields more than the depth. The timing of the jokes is spent on a second reading, and the self-analysis is so explicit that the speaker leaves less for a reader to find than a reticent book would. That holds the axis below the rest of the book’s figures but one, with a record still young beside the centuries behind the summit.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The field is American fiction of the 1960s. The intrinsic force is large: the book showed that the obscene comic monologue could be a serious novel, that sexual frankness could be the vehicle of moral comedy rather than its scandal, and that a community’s idiom could be turned on itself from inside without apology. It changed what a mainstream American novel could say aloud. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was the publishing event of 1969, a bestseller and a public quarrel at once; it fixed the Jewish mother and the guilt-ridden son as types in American comedy, film and television; the comic confessional novel of appetite and ethnic guilt that followed writes in its light; and it shaped Roth’s own career, which spent decades answering it. Held at the bar and not above it because its reach runs more through a voice and a type than through a method others took up as a form.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Survival is weighed over fifty-seven years, on form, presence and fabric. Form: the text survives whole, as published, and has stayed in print without a break; nothing is charged on it. Presence: continuous and international, the book widely translated and taught as a central book of postwar American fiction; Ernest Lehman’s film of 1972 failed and did not carry it. The charge falls on presence and fabric, a tenth below the usual figure for its span. Its surface is partly fixed to its moment: the analyst’s couch and the Freudian vocabulary as a culture’s common speech, the sexual revolution as news, the shock that was much of its first force. That shock is spent, and the book’s place in Roth’s reputation has moved toward the novels of the 1990s. It is read now as a classic of its decade more than as a living provocation, and decades demonstrate less than centuries.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Judged on Roth’s English, with no translation between. The command is of voice and timing. The sentences run on, interrupt themselves, break into capitals and into the remembered dialogue of scenes, and land the joke on the last word; the parents’ speech is caught in its syntax and rhythm, without condescension of spelling. “LET’S PUT THE ID BACK IN YID!” is the style in miniature: a slogan, a pun and a programme at once. The set pieces are built like routines, with setup, escalation and topper, and the turn from farce to grief, the father’s constipation becoming the father’s defeat, is made inside a single paragraph. The construction is cunning: the frame’s two ends, the slow approach to Israel, the analyst held silent until the last word. Charged: the tirade becomes a habit, the capitals and exclamations inflate in the middle sections, and the Monkey’s chapters are slacker in the making than the childhood.

Score: 8.8 / 10

One law governs: every desire is answered by its prohibition, and every rebellion carries the voice it rebels against. Take the two most distant elements, the boy in the kitchen under the bread knife and the grown man in Israel with Naomi. They obey the same law: a Jewish woman’s reproach unmans him, and the promised land is the mother’s kitchen again. The dictionary entry, the liver, the Gentile women, the office of Human Opportunity and the howl answer to one physics, and the punch line confirms it by putting the whole back on the couch. The range is wider than it looks, from childhood farce to adult despair, from Newark to Rome and Haifa. Held in the middle of the eights because the range is held by one consciousness that never yields the floor; narrowness is not coherence, and the book’s coherence is in part the coherence of a single obsession.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Many orders, held through one mind. Consciousness, fully and comically. The family, in three generations of a Newark household. The body and sexuality, at the centre. Ethnicity and assimilation, the Jewish neighbourhood against the Gentile country. Class and labour, in the father’s work for an insurance company that keeps him below its Protestant managers. Civic life, in the Commission of Human Opportunity and its official’s liberal pieties. Religion, as law and food and taboo, and Israel as the nation the diaspora imagines. They are integrated, not listed: each is a stage for the same bind. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the vantage. Every order is seen from inside one speaker’s appetite and grievance; history is a backdrop, the state a job title, and the other people, the women most of all, are present as his weather. A low mark here describes the form of a monologue.

Score: 7.6 / 10