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“Portnoy’s complaint” is the finest most compelling Roth’s work, as this guy puts it: still the greatest novel of uncontrollable teenage masturbation — admittedly a small field. An early success he seems to have not fully recovered from. Written from a stand point of a lying-on-the-couch, anger-driven, self-conscious, frustrated, rant-inclined, neurotic Jewish patient, it recounts the struggles against the ready-made ways of being young and the limit-loving society of the sixties. Even though they are said to have had parallel careers, the resemblance between Woody Allen’s and Philip Roth’s ways are just uncanny, I suppose it’s one of the cases when same ethnic background produces faithfully similar consciousnesses and talented spirits. They make irony and sarcasm seem like the most intricate product of Jewish engineering, too bad for them it cannot be sold as panacea against any kind of human distress. To make things even more spicy, like the shared background of strict Jewish families, the successful careers and the equally unsuccessful marriages, and the unsupressable libido were not enough, rumors have it that Mia Farrow, the grief-stricken stepmother and divorcee, has shortly benefited from Roth’s charms after the scandalous breakup with Woody.

Spicy details aside, you’ll find enough of those in the book itself, I give you some of Roth’s finest:

the mother:

“She was so deeply imbedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I  seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise. As soon as the last bell had sounded, I would rush off for home, wondering as I ran if I could possibly make it to our apartment before she had succeeded in transforming herself. Invariably she was already in the kitchen by the time I arrived, and setting out my milk and cookies. Instead of causing me to give up my delusions, however, the feat merely intensified my respect for her powers. And then it was always a relief not to have caught her between incarnations anyway – even if I never stopped thinking; I knew that my father and sister were innocent of my mother’s real nature, and the burden of betrayal that I imagined would fall to me if I ever came upon the unawares was more than I wanted to bear at the age of five. I think I even feared that I might have to be done away with were I to catch sight of her flying in from school through the bedroom window, or making herself emerge, limb y limb, out of an invisible state and into her apron.”

the father:

“His scrotum is like a long wrinkled face of some old man with an egg tucked into each of his sagging jowls – while mine might hang from the wrist of some little girl’s dolly like a teeny pink purse. And as for his shlong, to me, with that fingertip of a prick that my mother likes to refer to in public (once, okay, but that once will last a lifetime) as my little thing, his shlong brings to mind the fire hoses coiled along the corridors at school. Shlong: the word somehow catches exactly the brutishness, the meatishness, that I admire so, the sheer mindless, weighty, and unselfconscious dangle of that living piece of hose through which he passes streams of water as thick and strong as rope-while I deliver forth slender yellow threads that my euphemistic mother calls a sis. A sis, I think, is undoubtedly what my sister makes, little yellow threads that you can sew with… Do you want to make a nice sis? she asks me – when I want to make a torrent, I want to make a flood: I want like he does to shift the tides of the toilet bowl! Jack, my mother calls to him, would you close that door, please? Some example you’re setting for you know who. But if only that had been so, Mother! If only you-know-who could have found some inspiration in what’s-his-name’s coarseness! If only I could have nourished myself upon the depths of his vulgarity, instead of that too becoming a sources of shame. Shame and shame and shame and shame – every place I turn something else to be ashamed of.”