Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [102]
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PUNCH LINE
So [said the doctor]. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?
In 1997, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998, he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and, in 2002, he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005, The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004.” He has also won American PEN’s two highest awards: the PEN/Nabokov and the PEN/Bellow. He is the only living American novelist to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of nine volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.
The famous confession of Alexander Portnoy, who is thrust through life by his unappeasable sexuality, yet held back at the same time by the iron grip of his unforgettable childhood. Hilariously funny, boldly intimate, startlingly candid, Portnoy’s Complaint was an immediate bestseller upon its publication in 1969, and is perhaps Roth’s best-known book.
As Portnoy endeavors to satisfy his inextinguishable desires, he’s overcome by Portnoy’s Complaint: “(pôrt´-noiz kəm-pl´nt´) n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933 - )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: ‘Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful: as a consequence of the patient’s ‘morality,’ however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.’ (Spielvogel, O. “The Puzzled Penis,” Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV p. 909.) It is believed by Speilvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds in the mother-child relationship.”
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, SEPTEMBER 1994
Copyright © 1967, 1968, 1969, 1994, by Philip Roth
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in slightly different form by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1969.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Simon and Schuster for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Leda and the Swan” from The Poems of W. B. Yeats: A New Edition edited by Richard J. Finneran. Copyright © 1928 by Macmillan Publishing Company. Copyright renewed 1956 by Georgie Yeats. Reprinted by permission of Simon and Schuster.
Sections of this book have appeared in slightly different form in Esquire, New American Review, and Partisan Review.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.
eISBN: 978-0-307-74405-0
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