Word: portnoy
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth. 274 pages. Random House...
...Portnoy's Complaint, a novel in the form of a psychoanalytic monologue carried on by a guilt-ridden bachelor, is too funny not to be taken seriously. It is a Jewish Psychological Sex Novel of the Absurd. It is a work of farce that exaggerates and then destroys its content, leaving a gaping emptiness...
...expression of absurdity would be to write a play or a novel about a man who kills his father, marries his mother and lives happily ever after. But that seems a long way off-two or three years at least. In the meantime we have such dazzling performances as Portnoy's Complaint...
...novel, they are not its subject. The book is about absurdity-the absurdity of a man who knows all about the ethnic, sociological and Freudian hang-ups, yet is still racked by guilt because his ethical impulses conflict with the surge of his animal desires. In Alexander Portnoy's own words, he is "torn by desires that are repugnant to my conscience, and a conscience repugnant to my desires...
Strung out on Dr. Spielvogel's couch, Portnoy becomes the first of the lie-down comics. Raised in Newark and now holding the post of Assistant Human Opportunities Commissioner in New York City, he renders his past absurd in an attempt to lessen its painful grip on him. He keens the familiar tale of the strongwilled, overattentive mother and the castrated father. He tells how his mother fondled him during toilet training, how she eroticized the insides of his ears while removing the wax, and how she forced him to eat at knife point. Portnoy is continuingly being floored...