Although
Portnoy’s Complaint is a full-length novel, the reader is asked to accept it as an extended dramatic monologue
spoken by Alexander Portnoy while in analysis with his psychoanalyst, Doctor Spielvogel. The book is prefaced by a definition of "Portnoy’s Complaint," a textbook term coined by Spielvogel for a disorder in which "strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature." Although this definition may be a clinical summation of the dramatic conflict that preoccupies Portnoy, it does not come close to indicating the confessional intensity and bawdy hilarity of Roth’s novel.
The book is divided into connected, but somewhat independent, sections focusing on Portnoy’s parents (particularly his mother, "the most unforgettable character" he has ever met); his endless
adolescent experience with masturbation; his youthful sexual
experiences, especially with Gentile girls; his varied sexual experiences with "the Monkey," a high-fashion model from the hills of West Virginia; and his pilgrimage to Israel. All of these adventures are punctuated by rebellious outcries against the guilt that he feels for his sexual obsessions, as he continues to try to be "Mommy’s best little boy."
Indeed he is a "good boy"—that is, in public, making all A’s in school, becoming a good Jewish liberal, even to being appointed New York’s Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity. Nevertheless, it is his sexual fantasies and adventures and his shame about them which dominate the book, and if the reader can overcome his or her reactions to explicit sexual descriptions and four-letter words, both Portnoy’s escapades and his disproportionate guilt are riotously funny. No summary can convey the absurdist humor of Portnoy’s voice in recalling his adolescent preoccupation with his penis and the genitals of every female he encounters.
Dominated by his well-meaning but smothering mother, Portnoy yearns for the masculinity represented by a Turkish bath that he visits with his father, an all-male preserve. Yet, as much as he is obsessed with sex, he is also dominated by the repression he believes is characteristic of his Jewish childhood. Although the book is thoroughly Jewish in its idiom and cultural background, the dilemma Portnoy describes is also characteristic of American Puritan culture in general. No American male can fail to identify with his real but comic anguish.
The novel depicts one long quest in which Portnoy uses sexuality as a weapon to rebel against repression, even as he is victimized by sexuality itself. Caught by what Sigmund Freud calls "The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life," Portnoy cannot unite the two currents of feeling—the affectionate with the sensuous. Only when his sexual partner is degraded can he freely feel his sensual feelings—which explains his preoccupation with, and his ultimate rejection of, shiksas, or Gentile women. When he meets the Monkey, who seems the complete embodiment of his adolescent sexual fantasies, he ridicules and humiliates her until he drives her away—for he can neither accept her as a real woman nor be satisfied with her as a sexual fantasy.
Throughout the novel, Portnoy recounts his obsessive masturbation, his constant preoccupation with a pornographic fantasy object whom he calls Thereal McCoy, and his unsuccessful romantic and sexual experiences with various Gentile women. In addition, however, he devotes as much of his confessional monologue to his complaints against the repressions placed on him by his parents and his Jewish culture in general—which primarily amounts to the constant message that "life is boundaries and restrictions if it’s anything, hundreds of thousands of little rules laid down by none other than None Other." Finally, when he goes to Israel on a sort of pilgrimage to atone for his transgressions and to come to terms with his cultural roots, he meets and tries to have sex with a Jewish woman, only to discover that he is impotent with her. The novel ends with Portnoy’s drawn-out howl at what he calls the disproportion of the guilt he feels, followed by a "punch line," Dr. Spielvogel’s only words in the novel, "Now vee may perhaps to begin Yes?"