Portnoy's Complaint
How is it that a young man from a respectable Jewish family, enjoying an esteemed social standing, seeks out the most sordid and depraved sex instead of marrying young women from good bourgeois society, “with whom to raise intelligent, loving, and sturdy children”? > Dignity, Well-being, Love, Industry, Knowledge, Trust, Decency, High Principles, Compassion! Why the hell do I chase sensational sex? How can I lose myself in something so simple, so stupid, as cunt? The book is a long, entertaining, and hysterical monologue in which the protagonist retraces the events of his life, only ostensibly in a psychoanalytic quest for the origins of his inclinations (voyeurism, fetishism, autoeroticism, oral intercourse), but in reality to assert, to himself and to others, that his was the rightest path in life. To convey the sense of a narrative that defies easy summary or comprehension unless one plunges into its whirlwind prose, overflowing with words and idioms, one might quote a passage in which the protagonist explains why he did not marry one of the good, bourgeois girls he dated. > Well, there was her ostentatious, recurring school slang, to begin with. It was simply unbearable... And then there were her friends' nicknames: there were the friends themselves! Poody and Pip and Peddle... And then my slang caused her distress. The first time I said fuck in her presence (in the presence of her friend Pebble, with her Peter Pan collar and her tight-fitting cardigans, and tanned like an Indian from so much tennis at the Chevy Chase Club), such a look of agony passed over the countenance of the Pilgrim Fathers' heiress that you would have thought I had just branded the four letters into her flesh. Why, she asked so plaintively once we were alone, why must I be so clumsy? What possible pleasure does it give me to be so ill-mannered? What on earth did I prove? Why do you have to be so pus-y? “Where this word,” the protagonist explains, “stands for a ‘disposition to be disagreeable.’” > In bed? Nothing fun, no acrobatics or daring attempts; the way we did it the first time was the way we kept on doing it, I assaulted and she surrendered . If one considers that “ostentatious, recurring school slang” is the rough translation of an untranslatable English phrase such as “cutesy-wootsy boarding school argot,” and that to mean tight-fitting he uses the neologism “cablestitch,” one gets a clear idea of the novel’s prose, which hinges entirely on adjectives and slang expressions. The syntactic structure unfolds without order (like thoughts chasing one another), and the English vocabulary is frequently qualified by the verbal turns of American Judaism. It is an exhilarating read, though the book must be taken in all in one breath. Otherwise, one risks getting lost in the disordered succession of tales and characters. Beyond the obvious vocation for sensational sex, as the author calls it, the overarching thread of the novel can be identified in rules—and the need to break them. > What else, I ask you, were all those dietary prohibitions and rules you started out with (from an early age), what else if not to give us little Jewish children the habit of being repressed? Practice, darling, practice, practice, practice. Inhibition doesn’t grow on trees, you know; it takes patience, it demands concentration, it requires attentive, self-sacrificing parents and an obedient child dedicated to hard work, so as to produce in just a few short years a truly inhibited, tight-assed human being . It is evident that this revulsion toward rules has its roots in Jewish society, toward which the author directs a caustic critique, even if, deep down, one rich in affection and nostalgia. It is no accident that the protagonist’s flight ends precisely in Israel, as if in search of tradition and steadfast roots. The theme of prohibitions is nonetheless a subject of universal significance, considering the incessant appeal to moral codes and behavioral norms made by self-styled, and often hypocritical, spiritual and religious authorities. Why read it? It is an entertaining novel, but it must be experienced through an excellent translation.