Word: portnoy
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Neither of these books is awaited with the eagerness that attends Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (TIME, May 17), which comes on the scene next month after the greatest prepublication fanfare since Death of a President. The plot tells the sexual misadventures of Alex Portnoy from priapic adolescence in Newark to insatiable maturity in New York City government. Excerpts have appeared in the New American Review and Partisan Review as well as in Esquire, and the unpublished book has already earned over half a million dollars. Its real value, though, lies in Roth's revelation...
...Walter Ross paid $150 for it and intends to use it in the sunken garden she is growing. "I'm taking their word for it that it's good fertilizer," she says. "It should be, at $3 a pound." As pleased as any was Mrs. Allen Portnoy, who bid for immortality as a flower: the Missouri Botanical Garden will name its next discovery after her. Said her husband, writing out a $200 check, "My wife said she always wanted to be a philodendron." Happiest of all was Council President Homer E. Sayad, who totted up the bids, found...
...Portnoy's Complaint, newest novel by Philip Roth, 35, won't hit the stalls for another seven months, yet about half of its 80,000 words have already been quoted by four national publications. And pretty lively they are too: explicitly detailing Portnoy's super sex life from toilet training through masturbation and on to intercourse, intercourse, intercourse, all told in the form of monologues delivered by a Jewish boy to his psychoanalyst. With that kind of copy and more to come, no wonder Random House has given Roth a $250,000 advance for the book...
Columbus with Kinks. These and scores of remembrances are freely juxtaposed with precise details of Portnoy's adult sex life, particularly his exertions with a girl he calls "The Monkey," a beautiful and insatiable ex-hillbilly who is the fulfillment of every sex fantasy that Portnoy ever had. The only trouble is that The Monkey thinks of Portnoy as her way out of the depravity that he is working so hard to sink into. Hence, more guilt, which is the source of the comedy and the source of his sufferings. He tells of the time that...
What elevates the character of Alexander Portnoy far above the usual black-comedy victim is his insistence on knowing why he is in such pain, and his willingness and ability to examine every inflamed nerve ending. Portnoy's upbringing is not exclusively Jewish; it was a characteristic carryover from a time in the '20s and '30s when many immigrants and first-generation Americans saw their sons as Columbuses who would lead the family to security and status in the New World. The burden of these aspirations has left many of those Columbuses with painful kinks...