Portnoy's Complaint, by Phillip Roth

[This is my sample book review, so please follow this format: title and author in the subject line, a brief summary of the book (all of it, or as far as you've read), and then your comments and reactions, like this;]

I was in 7th grade when Portnoy's Complaint was published, and I remember the uproar it caused. No one ever forbade to read it, but I realize now -- almost 40 years later -- that the only reason no one forbade it is because no one in my family read it.

Portnoy's Complaint, by American Jewish writer Phillip Roth, is the long ramble of a disturbed and sexually frustrated man, Alexander Portnoy. The narrator tells his psychoanalyst one family story after another, methodically proving and explaining why he is so manic, so sexually obsessed, so deviant and so odd. Can anyone blame him for being what he is, when he comes from such a twisted family? The prose style is comedic -- Lisha and Courtney will testify that I was sitting at my desk softly snorting and laughing as I started reading this novel -- but there is an undercurrent of melancholy and loneliness that I find very human and therefore very appealing. I am about halfway through at this point, so I've moved through the sexual obsessions of an adolescent boy and am now witness to the sexual obsessions of an adult male. Through his explorations of his Jewishness, and his family dynamic, and his own vulgar and voracious appetites, Alexander Portnoy seeks to discover who he is; I find that I am completely caught up in his quest.

My bookclub read this book about four months ago, but I did not go to that meeting because I hadn't yet read the book. It's a book I've known as a landmark, an "important text" in modern American literature, but here I am, only just now getting around to reading it, nearly 39 years after it was first published. On Time Magazine's list of 100 most important novels, and cited by critics everywhere as a "must read," I cannot imagine myself recommending the book to my young students, but I hope that they discover Alexander Portnoy someday, perhaps when they are safely into their their twenties, thirties and beyond.