Portnoy's Complaint
Though is caused outrage and controversy at the time of its publication Roth’s comic novel of sexual obsession and frustration is now widely regarded as one of the best novels of the twentieth century.
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7mentions
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2016–2025years
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What Hacker News says
- Don't have to go back that far :) - the author mentions Portnoy's Complaint (1969) which contains the big sight gags for the raunchy comedies Something About Mary(1998) and American Pie(1999).
- I agree with you that the economic factors are much more persuasive.
I'm curious though, if you're a reader of contemporary literary fiction, do you think that it hasn't undergone a transformation to become more obscure and trendy compared to where it was in, say, the 1960s? Are the critics' favorites now just as accessible and of the same standard as, say, Lolita or Portnoy's Complaint were back then? Or do you agree there was a transformation and just disagree with the vague reasons he gives for it?
Also, do you have any recommendations of contemporary literary fiction for us here on Hacker News? Asking as someone who mostly only reads literary novels by dead people, contemporary sci-fi or speculative fiction, and of course, inevitably, books by Sally Rooney.
- "Publish an abridged version. Make it clear that it is abridged, and sell it as a separate product."
I recall when I was at school decades ago at a time when the use of certain words in public was much less acceptable than now that our Shakespeare texts had certain words expunged from them as they had been deemed unacceptable for our 'delicate' ears.
We highschool students were completely oblivious of the fact until to save costs I found a copy of my father's Shakespeare text which he had kept from his schooldays and used it as my textbook. When following its text in class I found my copy contained a paragraph that had been omitted from the authorized school edition.
Suffice to say, my edition became a sensation amongst the kids, everyone wanted to read the 'naughty' bit. It's so long ago that I can't remember chapter and verse but the word we delicate little flowers weren't supposed to see was bastard. Big deal!
What was immediately obvious to me even at that young age was that bannings, prohibition and censorship is counterproductive and it's much more likely to have the opposite effect of what's intended.
Around that time there was much controversy over the publication of D. H. Lawrence's† Lady Chatterley's Lover which was deemed by the Wowser Brigade as obscene. This only had the effect of multiple 'clandestine' copies turning up in the school playground with us boys huddled in small groups reading the 'naughty' parts.
Several years later a similar controversy erupted over Philip Roth' Portnoy's Complaint, and even later I came across that strange and most peculiar of works W.S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch at a secondhand book sale which shocked even my somewhat blunt sensibilities (its controversy was somewhat before my time but its notoriety still lingers even now).
It is almost certain that I would never have come across any of these works let alone bothered to have read them UNLESS public attention had made them notorious—the fact is I just don't read this sort of stuff unless controversy has first thrust it into the public limelight. There's a lesson here to be learned with respect to this Dahl affair.
Methinks there may be somewhat more to this controversy than just protecting young minds. There's nothing like a controversal beat-up to improve sales.
I'm almost certain that our censored Shakespeare texts had no impact on our morals whatsoever, if anything it made us kids more worldly and less naïve after we'd found out that we'd been censored.
We adults underestimate both the intelligence and resilience of kids, they know and don't forget when we've been hoodwinking them. No doubt, kids definitely need protection but overprotection can ill-equip them for the realities of a harsh world.
_
† Incidentally, in hindsight, it's interesting to note the double standard that applied when I was at school. On the one hand, our Shakespeare was censored over a nonsensically trivial matter, at the same time we had to study and be examined upon controversial novelist D.H. Lawrence's novel Sons and Lovers.
Whilst Sons and Lovers was a slightly saucy novel for that time it was somewhat of a joke that we kids had to study it around the time that the publication of Lawrence's more notorious novel was the subject of court action—that is, it was in the news for all the 'wrong' reasons. The dichotomy was damned obvious, even to us kids.
- I started reading Roth a couple months ago as part of a project to learn how to write better fiction (I also chose Philip K. Dick at the same time for some reason...). I partly chose Roth after seeing by how much he outnumbered any other writer in terms of entries for best 100 novels of the 20th century (I don't remember who published the list, but it was something pretty credible, and he had 6 entries on there IIRC).
I started with Portnoy's Complaint and enjoyed it, but I wasn't blown away or anything. More recently I've been reading a novelette + 5 short stories in a single volume (named after the novelette) titled, "Goodbye, Columbus"—and I've been seriously impressed. I finished the novelette and 2.5 of the short stories; both short stories were astounding (IMO), and the novelette was damn good.
My understanding is that the themes of being Jewish in the U.S. and male sexuality are solidly mainstays in his writing, which at first seemed like would limit the material's interest to me, since I'm not Jewish at all—but if you read descriptions of his novels across the years you'll find a very interesting (bordering on bizarre at times) range. I'm looking forward to reading more.
- There is a scene in Peter F. Hamilton's SF novel "Fallen Dragon" which immediately made me remember the restaurant "joke" from "Portnoy's Complaint".
SPOILER
Only here, the protagonist vomits violently after learning he's been treated (by his weirdo girlfriend) to some actual real meat from, yuck... a killed animal... not your regular vat-grown meat that every civilized person eats.
Oh, the power of childhood programming/imprinting...
- Undoubtedly you have identified some of the mainstays of his writing. You might enjoy Zuckerman Unbound as a novella (or is it a novel) about celebrity and identity, and I suppose reflecting his experience of the effects of publishing Portnoy's Complaint.
