A Sex Novel of the Absurd

PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT by Philip Roth. 274 pages. Random House. $6.95.

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.

Whether this emptiness is to be viewed with fear, hope or a confusing combination of both depends largely on the state of the reader's nerves. The explosion of puritan values--be they Christian or Jewish--has created an army of walking wounded who worry not only about whether they should be enjoying the pleasures of debt and sex, but also about whether or not they are hypocrites if they do. The result is often a pervading sense of absurdity.

In life, this sense has made its victims unwilling, if not unable, to participate in a traditional society; they are the sideshow of mass culture, offering freakish realizations of hidden fears and fantasies. In art, absurdity has changed form by radically altering the relationship among man, his pride and his gods. The dramatic structure that created the liberating pity and terror of the Oedipus plays, for example, only makes sense if one truly believes that there are gods who would destroy a man who grows too arrogant. Even the Freudian metaphors that have been used to give modern meaning to the ancient dramas are losing their force. The ultimate 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.

Lie-Down Comic. Although sex, psychoanalysis and Jewishness form the content of the 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 by the fact that she could be so unconscious of the unconscious.

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 his own.

In the 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.

As an 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 he is interested only in satisfying his endless desires.

By using the psychoanalytic monologue as a literary device, Roth has achieved an individuality of tone and gesture and a retrieval of detail that transform his characters into super-stereotypes, well suited for this age of exaggeration. Sophie and Jack Portnoy are pop Jewish parents; the Monkey is the apotheosis of the contemporary Id Girl; and Portnoy embodies not only the tics of a man trying to disentangle himself from his background, but also the latent fear of the liberal humanist that he may find himself out. It is no small concern to the Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity, champion of the underprivileged, that the human opportunities he really cares about wear skirts.

Scatology as a tool. Although the literary qualities of Portnoy's Complaint are uniquely Roth's, the monologue technique is pure show biz. The similarities between Portnoy's delivery and that of the late Satirist Lenny Bruce are readily apparent. While Bruce used scatology in his nightclub performances as a tool, primarily to uncover social hypocrisies, his savage humor also gained its neurotic style from conflicts about appearance and reality. For example, Bruce was constantly asking why portrayals of people doing something as beautiful and useful as making love were considered obscene while portrayals of murder and violence were not.

The basic danger of doing a book as an act or a routine is that it is only as good as its last bit. Despite Roth's extravagant comic talents and ingenuity, Portnoy's Complaint flags in stretches. The ending is a boisterious but somewhat flatfooted way of getting Portnoy off the stage. On balance, however, Portnoy's Complaint is skillfully paced, eliciting more laughs per page than any novel in recent memory--Catch-22 and The Sot Weed Factor notwithstanding.

It is part of Roth's immense gift that he can somehow make obsessive masturbation, paranoia and four-letter words funny and therefore ultimately inoffensive. No one has written so amusingly and yet so crassly about sex since Henry Miller. How does Roth do it? It is no secret that laughter is one of man's best defenses against those things that embarrass and terrorize him. Neither is it a secret that those who can make us laugh the loudest are often the most embarrassed and terrorized.

"Right now, Portnoy's Complaint is an event," says Philip Roth. "In two years it will be a book." The event was preceded by an enormous advance buildup; excerpts from the book were reprinted in various magazines, and the more outrageous passages were quoted and passed around. Now an assured hit that was sold out in bookshops weeks before its publication date, Portnoy's Complaint has already brought Roth a $250,000 advance on royalties, $350,000 in paperback sales and $250,000 for the

I Hollywood rights.

All of Roth's books have sold well, but he has never really been controversial or had his apartment examined in gossip columns ("the smart East 80s ... very solid, no patterns"). Now that Alexander Portnoy has made him a celebrity, he is dodging fame with SalI ingeresque determination--which, of course, only draws more attention to him. He used to answer the phone, "Benito Cereno here."* Now he doesn't answer his phone at all, and he tends to

I check in with his publisher long after business hours.

Letting Go. In many ways, Roth's past life resembles Alex Portnoy's. He was born 35 years ago in a heavily Jewish section of Newark. His father worked for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. Philip zipped through Newark public schools skipping a grade, went on to graduate from Bucknell University magna cum laude. In 1955 he took an M.A. and became an instructor at the University of Chicago, where Theodore Solotaroff, editor of the New American Review, remembers him as "a handsome young man who stood out in the lean and bedraggled midst of us veteran graduate students as though he had strayed into class from the business school."

Already Roth's miniatures of urban Jewish life were selling to magazines. The collection of short stories, Goodbye, Columbus, won Roth the National Book Award in 1960 at the age of 26 and two years later the prestigious job of writer-in-residence at Princeton. There he discovered to his dismay that his students could not write. In addition, his marriage to an older divorcee collapsed after four years. Philip went to New York after the publication of Letting Go, a troubled novel that interweaves threads from his Chicago adventure, his marriage and his grim life as a graduate student. The central question of the novel presages the issue that confronts Portnoy, only in reverse: Can one really let go of the self, renounce personal gratification for the sake of others? In Manhattan, Roth plunged into psychoanalysis, wrote a play that never got past the workshop stage, often retired to the writers' colony at Yaddo, a verdant estate in Saratoga Springs.

In 1967 he published When She Was Good, a bleak dissection of a smalltown Midwestern termagant without a single Jewish character. It was a long way from Newark and the Jewish milieu, but Roth's ventriloqual genius enabled him to handle the unfamiliar setting with considerable success.

Catching On. Roth is an enthusiastic mimic. "He takes all the parts in every story and really makes you see the people. He is the best storyteller I know," says Novelist Brian Moore. Lately he has become more wary. "I would call him a manic repressive," says Writer Albert Goldman, an old friend. "He knows he could be rocketed too high--the new hero who is all brains and sex. Actually, he is probably happiest working in monastic solitude." In recent years he has lived in Manhattan, a dashing, dark-featured bachelor with a beautiful blonde at his side. But now he is back in Yaddo, working on a new book.

Where he goes from here is an intriguing question, and could prove a serious dilemma for him. There is quite a difference between letting go and catching on, and with Portnoy's Complaint, Roth has caught on, but good. He has said that he will write about catching on:

"Instead of having a guy who is more and more pursued and trapped by his tormentors, I want to start with a guy tormented and then the opposite happens. They come to the jail and they open the door and they say to you, 'A terrible mistake has been made.' And they give you your suit back, with your glasses and your wallet. And they say, 'Look, people from big magazines are going to come and write stories on you. And here's some money. And we're very sorry about this.' "

-The name of the hero in a lugubrious Herman Melville story about a sea captain whose ship is taken over by mutinous slaves.

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