I found this in a pile of books left for people to choose from just beyond the check outs of my local supermarket after I'd done my weekly shop. I'd heard of the book, but knew nothing about it beyond that it was understood to be shocking when it was first released, there was film adaptation from 1972, and that Alan Bennett's mother read it when it first came out, knowing nothing about it before she read it.
Bennett in one of his anecdotes explains how he took it upon himself to explain the logic of the writing and the dynamic of the relationships in the book to her, explaining, as I paraphrase it, 'Mam, in this book the authorities have taken sexual hysteria off the ration book'. The government ration book being something that she had lived with between 1940-54 that had made it's mark in every part of her everyday life for years after it ended, and it being something she understood the purpose of at the time it was government policy.
I have also read several books that describe would-be fetish behaviour including the nineteenth century account of the fetish of being submissive, 'Venus in Furs' by Leopold Von Sacher Masoch. In fact I read it twice to understand it better. I too have had my difficulties with the psychology of rationing in my life. When I got 'Portnoy's Complaint' I thought it was book that I would enjoy reading whilst sat at the back of the bus, on journeys between 30 mins and 90 mins long when I could be doing nothing else. It is a brave experiment. Whether I finish the book remains to be seen.
It starts as it means to go on, as an unannounced confession in which the reader seems to be the person confessed to. How funny the reader finds this is depends on whether the reader is okay with taking on the role of unintended confessor, to a character-Alexander Portnoy-who has no obvious interest in any sort psychological resolution, spiritual absolution, or even accepting a logical approach to the easing of his problems. Portnoy is 33 and does a high status job of the city state of New York and lives with his parents, who for him to leave them requires him to marry a female they approve of. His father is a washed out character who sells insurance to black people who don't want it, and his mother wears the trousers in the house.
This is where when Alexander was a teenager he seemed to get caught in this cycle, where his confession becomes.... I think about sex and masturbate all the time, my mother wants me to marry and settle down, if I did marry as she wanted me to then I would not be able to settle down, therefore I think about sex a lot, I masturbate a lot, I sometimes find attractive girls who seem to find me attractive, and they too want to settle down with a husband who works to pay for the home they want to live but they contribute to the maintenance of through how clean and controlled the house is, this makes me change girlfriends often.
From the thoughts about the different girlfriends who the more he gets to know them the more they resemble his mother Portnoy is bounced back round the thought cycle to being confronted/controlled by his mother, repeat and repeat again with minor variations. To modern minds he would be a classic example of a commitment-phobe were his commitment to masturbation not quite so thorough, ongoing, and quite so consistent.
Alexander is helpful enough to his confessor, the reader, to list his fetishes for the first time on page 172 of the book. They are onanism exhibitionism and voyeurism. What he does not add, which might have shortened the book considerably if he had, could have been how for all of his fetishes being different to each other, they all rather neatly dovetail into one set of social actions as they all feed off each other.
Then there is the famous scene with the liver, in which any vegetarian reading the text might feel a certain disgust, but may also absolve themselves of their disgust as they paraphrase the Pharisees prayer, Luke Ch 18 V 11, and say of themselves 'I thank thee Lord I am not as other men (particularly not the young Alex Portnoy)'.
Is the book funny? Clearly yes in one respect, Roth writes Alexander Portnoy's speeches in extended similes and metaphors where the readers realises quite late into reading them that these tortured similes etc are actually jokes where the last part of the simile is the most tortured and extended part of the simile, the punchline of the long disguised joke. At that level the writing is very good, well sustained. But however good the writing is, writing for a character caught up in his own repeating cycle of events, behaviours and responses, much like the character Severin in 'Venus in Furs', does make the character one dimensional and self limiting, and where he is funny the joke is repetitive.
Two thirds of the book read, and Portnoy now has male friends his own age but still the dialogue is at the level of, I don't know-maybe one of the dirtier episodes of Beavis and Butthead, but that is opening out away from the previous accounts of sexual frustration. And still the young women come and go, leaving the reader disgusted and the mind that Alexander Portnoy has to be on one track, which his friends also get locked into when they try to be supportive company for each other.
One third of the book to go. It might be an uphill struggle but I will finish it. At the end Alexander Portnoy cannot quite remain the relationship/masturbatory equivalent of Sisyphus condemned to roll a boulder up a mountain only to see it fall to the bottom again, and start to roll the same stone up the mountain again. With no exit from his dilemmas as he continues relive his old traps, whilst half-looking for the way out from them.
Given the circularity of the plot and of Alex Portnoy's teenage sexual obsessions, and of his sense of perpetual conflict with the (Jewish) faith based adult world that he resists joining, any resolution is going to be a deflation.
Thus it proves. But how the deflation actually happens I will leave the reader to find out for themselves.
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