Portnoy’s Complaint

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

“Portnoy's Complaint scandalized—and forever changed—American Literature.” —The Washington Post

“Deliciously funny . . . absurd and exuberant, wild and uproarious . . . a brilliantly vivid reading experience”—The New York Times Book Review

“The novel that made Roth a literary superstar, and it remains his most controversial.”—Esquire

“Simply one of the two or three funniest works in American fiction.” —Chicago Sun-Times

From Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth, the hilarious and bewildering psycho-sexual novel that sparked international controversy and made Roth a literary celebrity.

Alexander Portnoy is a deeply neurotic Jewish lawyer and Portnoy's Complaint is his scandalous confessions to his psychiatrist. He is a sex addict who can’t get laid. A traumatized child who grew into an underdeveloped man. He has countless fantasies, each more disturbed than the last. He is usually too afraid to act on them. He is obsessed with his mother, who used to threaten him with a bread knife, and resentful of his father, who was chronically constipated. He is a compulsive masturbator. Alexander Portnoy is a pleasure-seeking, overly altruistic, catastrophically libidinal, Freudian-wet-dream of a pervert.