This is a “talking cure” as Freud never envisaged it, a farcical monologue by – this is Roth again – “A lust-ridden, mother-addicted young Jewish bachelor”, a tirade that would “put the id into yid”.Īlex is an archetypal Jewish-American son, coincidentally the same age as his creator, and a former “honour student” who’s now working in New York as a civil rights lawyer.
To facilitate his solitary lust, Portnoy commands a far richer arsenal of sex aids than most horny young men: old socks, his sister’s underwear, a baseball glove and – notoriously – a slice of liver for the Portnoy family dinner. In short, masturbation, and its corollary, satyromania. Dr Spielvogel sits behind, listening to a subject that is, says Roth, “so difficult to talk about and yet so near at hand”. Yes?”Īlexander Portnoy lies on the couch. Patrick Mullins has told this story as well as you could hope it would be told.The context of Portnoy’s hilarious, ranting monologue is established on the closing page. There seems to be nothing to do with Portnoy’s Complaint but sell it and read it. The juries are incapable of reaching a verdict. Judges conclude the book is obscene but does have literary merit. In the end everything is confounded by paradox.
The University of Western Australia librarian, Leonard Jolley, husband of Elizabeth, is a persuasive voice for sanity: “When I got the book, I thought I was justified in getting it.’’ There are brilliant, brutal ploys by prosecutors, who effectively block expert evidence and make it difficult for the literati to celebrate Roth’s book without defining it. He cleverly turned the book into an instant bestseller, while provoking Chipp so that he would have been happy to see him in jail. Michie had 75,000 copies of Portnoy’s Complaint just begging to be sold. The law does come across as a bit of an ass, whereas both Michie and the assembled literary world are impressive. You have to pinch yourself at the thought that this is Australia in 1970 – free love, hippiedom, sexual experimentation – yet here are barristers talking about do-it-yourself sex as if it were one of the horrors of the earth.
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