Word: portnoy
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...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...
With love and hate, he recalls his father, a shambling insurance salesman who proselytizes for the religion of security, yet suffers from chronic constipation because his intestinal tract is in the hands of the firm of "Worry, Fear & Frustration." In a life devoted to trying to please his parents, Portnoy confesses that his penis was all he could call...
...most explicit detail ever bound between the covers of a bestseller, Portnoy relives his adolescent masturbations. Boy Scouts, for example, will find the novel considerably more informative on the subject than their official handbook. He describes how he used his sister's unlaundered brassiere, his windbreaker on a bus, and even his baseball glove while sitting in the balcony of a burlesque house. But the more he discharged, the greater became his guilt. It was a vicious cycle that led him into his psychological ghetto of lust and shame...
...adult, Portnoy makes his most strenuous escape attempt with the aid of the Monkey, a hypererotic fashion model from the impoverished hills of West Virginia who is the fulfillment of Portnoy's steamiest adolescent sex fantasies. The Monkey business ends in a frenzied bedroom burlesque in Rome, made the merrier by the participation of an Italian prostitute. Comments Portnoy: "I can best describe the state I sub sequently entered as one of unrelieved busy-ness." But instead of solving his problem, the Monkey is just another source of shame. She wants Alex's social respectability while...