The Perils of Portnoy

Any work by Philip Roth commands attention. Lately, the author of Goodbye, Columbus, Letting Go and When She Was Good, one of the best of America's younger novelists, has chosen to exhibit his new fiction piecemeal in various magazines. His theme--the psychological problems of a modern Jewish-American--is not exactly new. But to judge from what has appeared so far, Roth's latest work looks like the most brilliant piece of radical humor in years.

It 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 of the performances of the late Lenny Bruce. No detail is varnished, no lust or act nice-Nellied as Portnoy complains, clowns and laments in his desperate efforts to claw his way to sanity. The result is a spontaneous emotional release of enormous authenticity and power.

The 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. The Jewish Blues, which reveals the Portnoy family guilts and secrets even further, appeared the following month in the first issue of New American Review. The fourth and by far largest section (28,000 words) appears in the Review's current issue (New American Library, paperback; $1.25). Titled Civilization and Its Discontents, after Freud's famous essay on the conflict between the individual's instinctual urges and society's demands for restraint, the latest monologue is the freest, funniest, most touching--and terrifying--of the lot.

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's who the black humorists are--of course!--the Henny Young-mans breaking them up down there in the Fontainebleau, and with what? Stories of murder and mutilation! 'Help, help,' cries the woman running along the sand at Miami Beach, 'my son the doctor is drowning!' Ha ha ha-- only it is my son the patient, lady." His family still haunts him. "Good Christ," he cries "a Jewish man with parents alive is a 15-year-old boy and will remain a 15-year-old boy till they die!"

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?"

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 he and The Monkey picked up a whore in Rome and took her to bed. "I can best describe the state I subsequently entered as one of unrelieved busyness. Boy, was I busy! I mean there was just so much to do."

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.

But the success of Roth's monologues rests not on the author's familiarity with this kind of sociology, but on the fact that few writers of his generation can match his ability to perceive and record manners and minutiae, or equal him in relating life's inner tumult to its outward appearances of order.

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