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.