Book Review: Philip Roth-“Portnoy’s Complaint,” (1969) “Zuckerman Unbound,” (1981) and “The Facts” (1988)

The iconic cover of "Portnoy's Complaint," by Philip Roth, 1969.

"Zuckerman Unbound," by Philip Roth, 1981.

"The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography," by Philip Roth, 1988.

Philip Roth, 1969.

Philip Roth’s best-selling 1969 novel “Portnoy’s Complaint” was a breakthrough for Roth as an author. The book shocked readers for its crude language and its unvarnished depiction of sexual behavior. It became a huge best-seller and thrust Roth onto the national spotlight. Roth fictionalized some of the craziness surrounding “Portnoy’s” success in his 1981 novel “Zuckerman Unbound,” featuring his alter-ego author Nathan Zuckerman. Roth later wrote about the time period that inspired the creation of “Portnoy’s Complaint” in his 1988 non-fiction book “The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography.” This essay will examine some of the themes in all three books, such as the blurring between fact and fiction that Roth constantly engages in. 

“Portnoy’s Complaint” takes the form of a very long comedic psychoanalytic monologue between patient Alexander Portnoy, and his analyst, Doctor Spielvogel, who is unheard from until the last line of the book. It’s a marvelously funny book, as Roth channels the beleaguered Portnoy and tracks his sexual obsessions. The book is all about voice and tone. Roth knew that by using the psychoanalytic monologue as a framing device for Portnoy to tell his story it would free Roth to be as uninhibited on the page as he wanted to be.

Portnoy is a well-behaved Jewish boy growing up in Newark in the 1940’s and 50’s. Portnoy obeys his parents, even though he feels overly stifled by them, even as an adult. Portnoy says in exasperation, “Good Christ, a Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year-old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die!” (P. 110) Portnoy is a gifted student, and he eventually becomes a lawyer. As Portnoy becomes an adolescent, he discovers the pleasures of masturbation, and quickly becomes addicted to it. Much of the book deals with his feelings toward his parents and his feelings about sex.

Portnoy can’t reconcile being a nice person with also having a sex life. He’s constantly wracked with guilt, and he constantly imagines what awful things will happen if someone, anyone, finds out about his sexual cravings. An ongoing joke in the book is Portnoy’s continual imagining of the headlines of his impending doom.  

Soon after “Portnoy’s Complaint” became a best-seller, people quickly jumped to the conclusion that Philip Roth and Alexander Portnoy were one and the same, and that Roth’s breakthrough novel was nothing more than a long, explicit confessional. As Roth said in a 1977 interview:

“I hadn’t just written a book, it seemed, but had become somebody who stood for something. What I realized was that in the popular imagination, and in the media, Roth and Portnoy were about to be fused into the same person.” (“Conversations with Philip Roth,” P. 102)

Roth’s fictional alter-ego, the author Nathan Zuckerman, has to contend with the same problems in Roth’s novel “Zuckerman Unbound,” after the publication of Zuckerman’s successful, sexually explicit novel “Carnovsky.” 

As Zuckerman wonders at the beginning of the book, “All this, this luck-what did it mean? Coming so suddenly, and on such a scale, it was as baffling as a misfortune.” (P.4) 

Zuckerman is constantly accosted by people in the street who recognize him and either think he is great or depraved, depending on what they thought of his book. “They had mistaken impersonation for confession and were calling out to a character who lived in a book.” (P.10) 

Even in writing to him, Zuckerman’s readers cannot separate him from his character. “Eleven letters tonight…Of these, six were addressed to Nathan Zuckerman, three to Gilbert Carnovsky; one, sent in the care of the publishing house, was addressed simply to ‘The Enemy of the Jews’ and had been forwarded to him unopened.” (P.58) 

Just before “Carnovsky” was published, Zuckerman ended his third marriage. He is confronted by a neighbor and friend of his wife’s, who says to him:

 “But that you could do what you have done to Laura…”

“What is that?”

“The things you wrote about her in that book.”

“About Laura? You don’t mean Carnovsky’s girlfriend, do you?” (P.167)

They get into an argument. “Their conversation grew louder and more shameful and went on for another ten minutes. His world was getting stupider by the hour, and so was he.” (P.170) 

In the course of “Zuckerman Unbound,” Zuckerman deals with an obsessive fan who is a former quiz-show winner, Alvin Pepler, loosely based on real-life quiz-show winner Herbie Stempel, and has a one-night stand with a fading movie star, Caesara O’Shea. Zuckerman also begins to get phone calls from someone threatening to kidnap his mother. Zuckerman is literally coming unbound and unglued, as his life gets crazier and crazier.

 Zuckerman’s father dies at the end of the book, and Zuckerman thinks that his father’s last word was “bastard,” directed at him. Zuckerman has a conversation with his brother about this, and his brother says to him:

“You killed him, Nathan. Nobody will tell you-they’re too frightened of you to say it. They think you’re too famous to criticize-that you’re far beyond the reach now of ordinary human beings. But you killed him, Nathan. With that book. Of course he said ‘Bastard.’ He’d seen it! He’d seen what you had done to him and Mother in that book!” (P.217) 

In a 1984 interview, Roth commented on the success of “Portnoy’s Complaint,” and “Zuckerman Unbound”:

“It was too big, on a larger and much crazier scale than I could begin to deal with, so I took off. A few weeks after publication, I boarded a bus at the Port Authority terminal for Saratoga Springs, and holed up at Yaddo, the writer’s colony, for three months. Precisely what Zuckerman should have done after ‘Carnovsky’-but he hung around, the fool, and look what happened to him. He would have enjoyed Yaddo more than he enjoyed Alvin Pepler. But it made ‘Zuckerman Unbound’ funnier keeping him in Manhattan, and it made my own life easier, not being there.” (“Conversations with Philip Roth,” P. 176)

Does Roth’s book “The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography,” shed any more light on the writing and publication of “Portnoy’s Complaint”? “The Facts” begins in an odd way, as the first few pages are a letter from Philip Roth to Nathan Zuckerman, asking him for his opinion of the manuscript. What’s odd about this, of course, is that Nathan Zuckerman is a fictional character, a creation sprung from the fecund mind of Philip Roth himself. “The Facts” takes the reader through Roth’s childhood growing up in a Jewish enclave of Newark, New Jersey, to his college experiences at Bucknell University, through his disastrous first marriage, and up to the publication of “Portnoy’s Complaint.” 

Roth said of “The Facts” in a 1988 interview, “There were other parts to the book that aren’t there now. It went farther along in time. But that wasn’t as interesting, I suppose, because a calm and orderly life is not as interesting as pressure and crisis.” (“Conversations with Philip Roth,” P. 222)

In the chapter “Girl of My Dreams,” Roth recounts how he met “Josie Jensen” in 1956, when he was an instructor at the University of Chicago. Roth had seen her before, but picked her up on the street, and convinced her to have a cup of coffee with him. Roth began a relationship with Josie, but it proved to be a very tumultuous one. Roth writes that two years into their relationship “…we no longer had anything resembling a love affair, only a running feud focused on my character flaws and from which I was finding it impossible to escape no matter how far I fled.” (P.95) Roth describes what a miserable relationship they had, yet he proves unable to shake Josie as she follows him to New York City. He allows her to move in with him when she is broke. Josie is clearly a mess, as she is an unstable woman with a martyr complex who is dearly in need of counseling, and the reader is hoping that Roth can extricate himself from the clutches of this woman when he ends the chapter with the bombshell: “Reader, I married her.” (P.112)

“Josie Jensen” is a pseudonym for Margaret Martinson Williams, Roth’s first wife. They married in 1959, and were separated by 1962, but Williams was unwilling to divorce Roth. In May 1968, while Roth was in the middle of writing “Portnoy’s Complaint,” Williams was killed in a car crash in Central Park, thus suddenly freeing Roth of both his marriage and his continued alimony payments. Roth arranged the funeral, at Frank Campbell’s on Madison and 81^st Street, the same funeral chapel that Zuckerman lives across the street from in “Zuckerman Unbound.” 

Roth has this to say about the different events that aided him in the creation of “Portnoy’s Complaint”: 

“What I found then, in New York…were the ingredients that inspired ‘Portnoy’s Complaint,’ whose publication in 1969 determined every important choice I made during the next decade. There was this audience of sympathetic Jewish friends who responded with euphoric recognition to my dinner-table narratives; there was my intense psychoanalysis, which, undertaken to stitch back together the confidence shredded to bits in my marriage, itself became a model for reckless narrative disclosure of a kind I hadn’t learned from Henry James…” (P.137) 

Roth stresses the point that “Portnoy” was not in any way a self-portrait:

“Unhampered by fealty to real events and people, it was more entertaining, more graphic, and more shapely than my own analysis, if not quite to the point of my personal difficulties. It was a book that had rather less to do with ‘freeing’ me from my Jewishness or from my family (the purpose divined by many, who were convinced by the evidence of ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ that the author had to be on bad terms with both) than with liberating me from an apprentice’s literary models…” (P.156-7)

The last chapter of “The Facts” is Zuckerman’s response to Roth’s manuscript. It’s a little unorthodox to have a fictional character critique the work of the author who created him, but Philip Roth has never been afraid to take chances in his work. 

Zuckerman is quite astute as he writes about Roth’s work:

“You see your writing as evolving out of three things. First, there’s your journey from Weequahic Jewishness into the bigger American society…Second, there was the terrific upheaval of the involvement with Josie and the self-consciousness this ignited about your inner weaknesses as a man. Third, as far as I can make out, there’s your response to the larger world…The whole book seems to be leading to the point where these three forces in your life intersect, producing ‘Portnoy’s Complaint.’’’ (P.164-5) 

I agree with Zuckerman, that “Portnoy” was a breakthrough for Roth, and it’s the moment where it all comes together for him. Roth is at last free of his marriage, and he is creating fiction using a unique voice that is his own creation. He’s no longer trying to write like Henry James-as though there’s any way Henry James could ever have written anything as shocking or as funny as “Portnoy”! 

Zuckerman calls out Roth on a lot of things in his response to Roth’s manuscript. For example, he criticizes Roth’s use of a pseudonym for his wife, rather than her real name. Zuckerman also accuses Roth of being less than totally honest in the manuscript. Why does Roth have Zuckerman criticize him so much? As a way to take ammunition away from his critics? Why didn’t he change the narrative of the book if he felt the way Zuckerman does? Or is Zuckerman pursuing his own agenda? If Roth keeps writing non-fiction, then Zuckerman will have no reason to exist. Is Zuckerman criticizing Roth in order to sway Roth back to writing fiction? When an interviewer asked Roth about this in 1988, shortly after the book was published, he said “Zuckerman is wrong. I think the book is pretty candid. I’ve come as close to the truth as I can. Zuckerman can say whatever he wants. That’s his business.” (“Conversations with Philip Roth,” P.241)

What is the line between fact and fiction in the work of Philip Roth? It’s a thin line at times, as shown by the exchange of letters between real author Roth and fictional author Zuckerman. Ultimately, the line between fact and fiction might not really matter and might distract from appreciating Roth’s work. But it’s one that critics have been asking about Philip Roth for decades. Is Philip Roth really Nathan Zuckerman or Alexander Portnoy? Did he really do everything they did in the novels? Of course he didn’t. He’s an author; he makes up stories for a living. I think that we tend to assume that events actually happened to authors the exact same way they happened in a book, that writing fiction is not so much an act of imagination as one of transcription, that all they have to do is merely write it down. 

 As Nathan Zuckerman says, “That writing is an act of the imagination seems to perplex and infuriate everyone.” (“The Anatomy Lesson”)

Roth said in a 1985 interview: “You’re confusing me with all those astute book reviewers who are sure that I am the only novelist in the history of literature who has never made anything up.” (“Conversations with Philip Roth,” P. 196) Roth also said in the same interview: “If all these subtle readers can see in my work is my biography, then they are simply numb to fiction-numb to impersonation, to ventriloquism, to irony, numb to the thousand observations of human life on which a book is built, numb to all the delicate devices by which novels create the illusion of a reality more like the real than our own. End of lecture.” (“Conversations with Philip Roth,” P.192)

Roth also said in a 1988 interview: “I’m not going to pretend that I’m Portnoy. Why should I? Writing is a performance. I imbue the characters with aspects of my personality. I’m the writer. I’m not the actor.” (“Conversations with Philip Roth,” P.241)

However, it’s easy to see why book reviewers and critics would wonder how much of Roth is in his books. When an author gives a character as many surface similarities to himself as Roth gives Alexander Portnoy, of course people are going to assume that the author is that character. Yes, it’s lazy to assume that the author is his character, but it’s natural for people to think that way. I’m doing a certain amount of it in this essay. As an author, you invite a certain amount of that kind of critical attention if your characters have that many similarities to your own background. 

Some of the similarities between Portnoy and Roth: 

Portnoy and Roth were both born in Newark in 1933. Their fathers were both insurance salesmen. Their mothers were both homemakers. Portnoy and Roth both graduated from Weequahic High in 1950. (Nathan Zuckerman was in the class of 1949 at Weequahic.) Roth and Portnoy both skipped two grades in school. 

Are these similarities meaningful? Not terribly, all it means is that Roth has chosen to write about someone coming from a similar background as his. Most critics don’t pay attention to the differences between Portnoy and Roth:

Portnoy has an older sister, Roth has an older brother. Portnoy has difficult relationships with both his parents, while Roth got along well with his parents, despite occasional disagreements with his father. Roth attended Bucknell University, Portnoy did not. Portnoy went on to become a lawyer, while Roth is a writer-although Roth has admitted that it crossed his mind when he was young to become a lawyer. Roth was in the Army for one year, Portnoy was not. Portnoy has never married, while Roth married in 1959. 

Of course, one could say that these differences are not meaningful either. I would counter that by saying that we will ultimately never know whether or not Philip Roth really experienced all of the things that Alexander Portnoy and Nathan Zuckerman experienced in the novels. What’s important is the work; that these books are well-written, and they clearly are. Roth’s novels are convincing enough to make people wonder how much of the events depicted actually happened to him, which is in a way the highest praise there is. 

“Portnoy’s Complaint” ushered in a new era in Philip Roth’s career, one in which every move he made would be carefully watched by readers around the world. So it’s fitting to leave the last word to Dr. Spielvogel, whose only line is the closing line of “Portnoy’s Complaint.” “So {said the doctor}. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” (P.274) Once “Portnoy’s Complaint” was published in 1969 now Philip Roth may perhaps to begin-a new chapter in both his life and career.

Book Review: "Goodbye, Columbus," by Philip Roth (1959)

"Goodbye, Columbus", by Philip Roth, 1959.

Philip Roth, 1960's.

I recently read Philip Roth’s first book, “Goodbye, Columbus,” which includes the novella-length title piece and five short stories. First published in 1959, “Goodbye, Columbus” won the National Book Award the following year. The book’s critical reception placed Roth at the top of a list of young literary talent.  

“Goodbye, Columbus” details the summer romance between Neil Klugman and Brenda Patimkin. Neil is a recent college graduate working at a library, and Brenda is a college student at Radcliffe. Neil and Brenda are both Jewish, but her family is much more financially successful than his is. The difference between their families is pronounced, but the Patimkins are friendly to Neil, and even let him stay in their house for a week towards the end of the summer. 

Neil and Brenda quickly become lovers, and Neil gets way too hung up on persuading Brenda to get a diaphragm. She eventually acquiesces to his wishes, even though she doesn’t really want to get a diaphragm. For her part, Brenda is too hung up on having Neil be whatever she wants to him to be, not what he actually is. This is partly Neil’s fault, as he doesn’t stand up for himself as much as he should. When he vacations at the Patimkin house, Brenda makes him get up and run every morning because she wants him to, not because he seems to have any desire to. Like a lot of young romances, they are both trying too hard to shape the other person into their ideal rather than accepting the other person for who they are. 

One exchange that reveals this occurs as Neil and Brenda stretch in preparation for running. She says to him:

“’You know,’ Brenda said, ‘you look like me. Except bigger.’

We were dressed similarly, sneakers, sweat socks, khaki Bermudas, and sweat shirts, but I had the feeling that Brenda was not talking about the accidents of our dress-if they were accidents. She meant, I was sure, that I was somehow beginning to look the way she wanted me to. Like herself.” (P. 50)

Not surprisingly, Neil and Brenda’s relationship does not last much longer than the summer, as after Brenda goes back to college, her mother finds Brenda’s diaphragm hidden in her dresser. Needless to say, the Patimkins are shocked at what’s been happening right under their noses. When Brenda tells Neil about this, he exacerbates the situation by accusing Brenda of deliberately leaving the diaphragm in her drawer so her mother would find it. Much like a Woody Allen character, Neil just keeps stubbornly pushing at exactly the wrong point, and their relationship is over.

Personally, I found the title novella to be more interesting than the short stories. Roth creates vivid characters in “Goodbye, Columbus” that stick with you long after you’ve finished reading. The short stories are not as memorable, and the characters are not as finely drawn. The novella still feels fresh today, but most of the short stories are set in the past, and because of this “Goodbye, Columbus” sometimes feels like a much older book, like it was published in 1949 instead of 1959. “Defender of the Faith,” takes place in 1945, the main action of “You Can’t Tell a Man By the Song He Sings” takes place in 1942, and “Eli, the Fanatic” takes place in 1948. 

Interestingly enough, the five short stories in “Goodbye, Columbus” are some of the only short stories Roth has ever published, except for serialized parts of his novels. After this book, he seldom returned to the short story form. Obviously Roth must have found that his talents were better suited to longer works.

“The Conversion of the Jews” is a rather trifling story, as it details a young boy’s petulant desire to have others bow to his whims. He climbs onto the roof of his synagogue, and threatens to jump off unless the rabbi and his mother say that they believe in the Immaculate Conception, a key teaching of Catholicism. This placates the boy, and he comes down. I guess the point is that people will say anything so a boy won’t jump off of a roof, but that doesn’t seem to be a very interesting point to make. 

“Defender of the Faith” is a much more intriguing story, and my favorite of the short stories in this book. When the story was originally published in The New Yorker, it caused a large uproar among Jewish readers. The story is narrated by Sergeant Nathan Marx, a combat veteran who is posted back to the United States as the European campaign wraps up in the spring of 1945. Marx, who is Jewish, encounters a pushy private named Sheldon Grossbart, who is also Jewish. Grossbart asks for a lot of special favors, and Marx, against his better judgment, usually gives in to Grossbart’s wishes. 

Grossbart plays off of Marx’s desire to aid Jewish solidarity, asking to be excused from cleaning the barracks on Friday night so he and the other Jewish soldiers can attend religious services. Grossbart says that the Jews need to stick together.

“’That’s what happened in Germany,’ Grossbart was saying, loud enough for me to hear. ‘They didn’t stick together. They let themselves get pushed around.’” (P. 125) 

 Grossbart then wants to be given a weekend pass so he can go visit his aunt and celebrate Passover. It’s a month after Passover, and no one is supposed to get passes during basic training, but Marx gives in, writing a pass for Grossbart and two other Jewish privates. Marx is already greatly annoyed by Grossbart, but he convinces himself that he has done Grossbart a generous favor. The final straw comes when Grossbart returns from his aunt’s house with an egg roll for Marx, rather than the gefilte fish that Marx asked for. This strikes Marx as odd, and Grossbart admits that he just reread the letter and his aunt actually invited him home next week. Marx explodes in anger, and warns Grossbart to stay away from him. 

The soldiers are due to be sent to the West Coast and from there on to the Pacific, but Grossbart somehow pulls a string and is due to be sent east, to New Jersey, much closer to his home. When Marx learns of this, he pulls a string of his own and lies to the officer in charge of the roster, saying that Grossbart wants to be sent to the Pacific. Marx succeeds in getting Grossbart sent to the Pacific along with the other men.

It’s difficult to see today why the story caused such a furor. My best guess is that people were offended by the actions of the two main characters. Grossbart is a scheming jerk, and Marx abuses his power in order to punish Grossbart. Both characters do bad things that we might find morally wrong. Did readers get upset at Roth because he was showing that Jewish characters could be devious and immoral? 

Roth described the controversy about “Defender of the Faith” in the 2013 American Masters documentary, “Philip Roth Unmasked.” Roth says that after the story was published The New Yorker received many angry letters from readers:

“I was suddenly being assailed as an anti-Semite, this thing that I’d detested all my life. And a self-hating Jew. I didn’t even know what it meant.”

Roth goes on to talk about the subject matter of “Goodbye, Columbus”:

“There were those who were offended, and there were the rabbis who gave sermons denouncing me as an anti-Semite. I suppose what riled them about ‘Goodbye, Columbus’ was the story about a Jewish middle-aged man who is an adulterer, a Jewish girl having sex who bought a diaphragm. I maintained then, as I do now, that there were Jewish girls who bought diaphragms, and there were Jewish husbands who were adulterers. You know, Isaac Singer, when he was criticized by Jewish critics and Jewish readers for his stories, they would say rather ‘Mr. Singer, why must you write about Jewish whores and Jewish pimps?’ And Singer said ‘What should I write about? Portuguese whores? Portuguese pimps?’”

Roth was simply writing what he knew, and he refused to idealize his characters. Instead, he painted them as the complicated people human beings actually are.

“Epstein” is the above-mentioned story about a Jewish middle-aged married man who begins an affair with a neighbor. It’s not that compelling of a story. Perhaps Roth was trying to stretch and show that he could successfully channel an older man’s voice.

“You Can’t Tell a Man By the Song He Sings” is a rather dull story. It’s about a man who remembers an ex-con he went to high school with. It’s not very interesting or dramatic. But the end has a connection to one of Roth’s later works, as it’s revealed that a teacher they tormented was later fired during the Red Scare because he had been a Marxist in 1935. The subject of the Red Scare is one that Roth would return to much later in his 1998 novel, “I Married a Communist.” 

“Eli, the Fanatic” is the tale of a young Jewish lawyer who is hired by other young upwardly mobile Jews in his suburban community to put pressure on an Orthodox Jewish school to move away from their town. The suburban American Jews don’t want anything to do with the Orthodox Jews, who are displaced persons from Europe, scattered by World War II. It’s an interesting contrast between the two groups, who are in opposition, even though they are both Jewish. 

 “Goodbye, Columbus” is a very good first book, and it clearly showed that Roth had a lot of talent. The title novella is still a good read today, more than 50 years after it was first published, and it finds Roth dealing with many of the subjects that would inform much of his later writing-sex, class, family, and what it means to be a Jew in modern American society.