Books: 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.