5/22/2023 0 Comments Roth portnoy's complaintReally imagine, let alone afford, the analyst’s couch. We remember Portnoy erupting on the analyst’s Portnoy, impaling with pitiless thrusts invasive mothers, plugged-up fathers,ĭizzying shikses in heat. Do you hear me, Alex? I have to see what’s in that bowl!”ĭoctor, do you understand what I was up against? My wang was all I really had that I could call my own. I tear off my pants, furiously I grab that battered battering ram to freedom, my adolescent cock, even as my mother begins to call from the other side of the bathroom door. “I promise!” and race from the kitchen-to where? Where else. Jack, make him promise, before he gives himself a terrible tsura, and it’s too late. “ Hamburgers,” she says bitterly, just as she might say Hitler, “where they can put anything in the world in that they want-and he eats them. Don’t eat French fries with Melvin Weiner after school.” Who in the history of the world has been least able to deal with a woman’s tears? My father. Sophie (especially Sophie), The Monkey, “my father,” Cousin Heshie, Rabbi Warshaw, Dr. Its characters became instant archetypes. Irving Howe famously said that the cruelest thing one could do with Portnoy’s Complaint was “read it twice.” But why reread it when the first time was unforgettable? Back when the book was published, exactly 50 years ago, I knew people who sat around in coffee shops, student unions, and Hillel houses reading the entire book out loud to one another.
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