The origins of the novel are the subject of dispute, and all explanations are vulnerable to Roth’s own mischievous taste for throwing literary hounds off the scent. Roth’s weary complaint was that some of his readers still haven’t got over his controversial and brilliantly comic exploration of sexual desire and frustration, especially as this might relate to a Jewish man’s mother. I recall that part of this interview, never used in the printed version, concerned his persistent frustration with his reputation as the author of a “shocking” novel that’s now nearly half a century old. I interviewed Roth in 2008, the year of his 75th birthday, for the publication of Indignation. Taken by hundreds of thousands of American readers as a confession in the guise of a novel, it placed its author inexorably centre stage in the minds of his audience. He will never again hold forth as brilliantly or as memorably as he does in this novelįor all its avowed literary seriousness, this “wild blue shocker” ( Life), a novel in the guise of a confession, was an immediate bestseller. Roth’s response has been to identify his main influence as “a sit-down comic named Franz Kafka”. His mother would have preferred him to become a doctor, marry and have children, but we are all too aware that her wishes will never be part of her son’s adult life.Īlex free associates for Spielvogel with a wild frenzy that some have suggested is owed to the standup comics of Roth’s youth, and perhaps near-contemporaries such as Lenny Bruce. 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.
The context of Portnoy’s hilarious, ranting monologue is established on the closing page.
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