Recommendations from our site
“Portnoy’s Complaint reflects Roth’s engagement with psychotherapy during the mid-60s and the breakup of his first marriage. Roth discovered that he could use his struggle for self-understanding as the subject matter of a novel entwined with satire. It was a literary breakthrough. In the 60s, a lot of novels dealt with psychoanalysis but what Roth linked it to was outrageous comedy…Portnoy’s Complaint was a breakout book. It made him a great literary success and financially secure but, at the same time, it was a burden. He became so famous that people would yell at him on the streets of New York. He couldn’t escape being the Philip Roth of Portnoy’s Complaint. He turned to less intimate, shorter work—like Our Gang, the satire of Nixon—before he regained his footing as a writer.” Read more...
Ira Nadel, Biographer
“The paradigmatic novel of New Jersey for me is Portnoy’s Complaint.” Read more...
