Word: portnoy
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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...
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 Excerpts have appeared in the New American Review and Partisan Review as well as in Esquire, and the unpublished book has already earned over half a million dollars.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...