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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.