Word: portnoy
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...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...
...Portnoy wears his Oedipus complex as if it were a festering good-conduct medal that had been stapled to his sternum. But his is a tragedy in which Oedipus is played by Groucho Marx. Mother Portnoy is a vibrant orange-haired vision who has never given up trying to smother her son in the warm pudding of her ample bosom. She surpasses the grotesque stereotype simply because Roth plays her absolutely straight, making her totally and comically unconscious of the unconscious...
...Portnoy recalls her with emotions that are swollen with love and loathing. He remembers her seductive tones during his toilet training and ponders the absurdity that such a memory could help mold his character. He relates the telephone conversation he had with her after returning from his European vacation: "Well, how's my lover?" she asked, as his father listened on an extension. "And it never occurs to her," says Portnoy, "if I'm her lover, who is he, the shmegeggy she lives with...
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...