One long confessional monologue delivered to a silent psychiatrist — furious, brilliantly funny, and pathologically self-aware. Roth's narrator understands exactly what is wrong with him and is completely helpless to change it, which turns out to be the funniest and most honest thing a character can do.
Philip Roth's breakthrough novel, and a book that is still, more than fifty years after publication, one of the funniest and most uncomfortable sustained performances in American literature. Portnoy's Complaint is a single confessional monologue delivered by Alexander Portnoy to his silent psychiatrist. It runs somewhere north of 250 pages. It is all one voice. And that voice — furious, filthy, brilliantly self-aware, genuinely ashamed — is the voice Roth used to open up a whole region of permissible subject matter for American fiction.
The book is structured like a specific kind of comic complaint. Portnoy cannot stop talking about his mother, his father, his complicated relationship with his body, his girlfriend, his guilt about his girlfriend, his guilt about his guilt. The mode is confession, but the psychology is theatrical — Portnoy is a man who understands exactly what is wrong with him and is completely unable to stop doing any of it. That gap, between self-knowledge and self-control, is where the book lives. Roth makes it catastrophically funny, and also, by the end, sadder than you'd expect a comic novel to be allowed to be.
I bring this book up when somebody starts a conversation about the confession as a literary form. Portnoy's Complaint is the case study. It works because Roth refuses to let the confession be a confession — Portnoy is performing, he knows he is performing, the psychiatrist is a prop, and the whole book is actually a one-man show about a man who is addicted to the form of his own self-examination. That is a different thing than an honest confession, and the novel is about the difference. Which has applications anywhere you encounter somebody who is too good at telling on themselves.
The prose is extraordinary. Roth's sentences have a specific breathlessness to them that is, I think, genuinely new in American fiction. He's using the full range of Jewish-American speech — Yiddish-inflected English, Philly-neighborhood cadence, the long run-on kvetch — and turning it into a prose instrument capable of things standard novelistic English can't do. Writers who came after Roth inherited this. You can hear it in Lethem, in Chabon, in half a dozen younger novelists who don't always know they're working in Roth's voice.
Read it when you are not at the river. It is an indoor book. But it will change what you consider possible on the page, and that change travels with you everywhere, including to the next campfire conversation about what stories are really for.
