Word: portnoy
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...takes the form of a series of monologues ranted by a patient at his psychoanalyst. The patient is a 34-year-old bachelor named Alexander Portnoy, high-school honor student from Newark, first in his law-school class, and now assistant human-rights commissioner in New York City. At first glance, the chronicle of Portnoy's pain, rooted as it is in Jewishness and the urban environment, may appear to have only specialized appeal, but Roth gives it a universality that reaches beyond ethnic boundaries. It is a coda of rage and savagely honest self-lashing reminiscent...
...first monologue appeared in the April 1967 issue of Esquire under the title A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis. It is a short, tame outline of Portnoy's problems. Things loosened up in a hurry with the 6,000-word installment published last August in Partisan Review; called Whacking Off, it is a frantic confession of boyhood sin. Portnoy recalls how, as an adolescent, he always had to please his parents publicly, while he privately and obsessively masturbated to please himself; this experience sentenced him to a chronic condition of shame, which he begs his analyst to cure...
Groucho as Oedipus. Roth sees Portnoy's life as "a masochistic extravaganza," and no one is more aware of this than Portnoy himself. In one of his many hysterical bursts of insight, he cries that he is "torn by desires that are repugnant to my conscience, and a conscience repugnant to my desires." He views himself as the victim in a grim Jewish joke. "Doctor, Doctor," he pleads, "please. I can't live any more in a world given all its meaning and dimension by some vulgar nightclub clown. By some-some black humorist! Because that...
...Joseph Portnoy described a new and simplified test which its developers claim is truly portable and fast. Called the RPR (for Rapid Plasma Reagin) card test, it requires only three drops of blood, obtained by pricking the subject's finger...
Like for instance last year when the Crimson made the same trip. Friday night in New York a sophomore, Fred Portnoy scored four points in the last 25 seconds, the last two with a second remaining (although many observers thought it was a bit later than that), and Harvard lost by two. The next night the team played one of its best games of the year in ripping Cornell...