Why It’s Impossible to Teach Portnoy’s Complaint

Here’s a mostly useless understatement: Portnoy’s Complaint is a really interesting book. The novel’s only two scenes, really, are a psychoanalyst’s couch and an analysand’s neither entirely coherent nor entirely chronological memories, themselves overrun by rage, resentment, bitterness, longing, regret, and desire. Its Oedipal narrative roller coaster is bookended by the Diasporic pre-Oedipal mother-awe with which the novel begins and the post-Oedipal fantasy of all-American Jewish fatherhood, engaged during a final descent into Ben Gurion Airport, that is the keynote of the final chapter. And its representation of twentieth-century Jewish Americanness amounts to some of the funniest, most outrageous writing in the English language. But is all this necessarily relevant to a discussion about teaching Roth—especially, say, at the undergraduate level? For me, the answer certainly has something to do with the fact that it’s just plain hard to stage this kind of problematization of identity, which is so close to what continues to be fascinating and important about Roth’s work—almost all of Roth’s work—in most undergraduate classrooms. But it’s more complicated than that. My professional identity—my day job—is in part that of a scholar and teacher of Jewish American literature, and I don’t think a semester has gone by—certainly not a year—that I haven’t taught at least one Roth novel. To be honest, I don’t count Portnoy’s Complaint among my favorites, but I want to talk about it here for a few reasons. I don’t often teach it, but I’ve now taught Portnoy in three different contexts. The first time was during one of my first semesters at Penn State, about five years ago, in an upper-level single-author class for majors that I devoted specifically to Philip Roth, cross-listed between English and Jewish Studies. The other two came this last semester, in a general education class on American comedy and in a post–Civil War American literature survey for English majors. I should also say that I’d be lying if I said the primary reason I assigned it this semester—twice!—wasn’t in preparation for, and to test some ideas for, this roundtable panel. And also to see if maybe I wasn’t wrong in my tepid response to the book, given that it had been a while since I last taught it.

But indeed regardless of the context, discussion of the book is almost always anemic. The single-author class was one of the best I’ve taught, and the kids had really intelligent things to say about just about everything we read, from “Eli” to Everyman—except for Portnoy’s Complaint. I explained to the students what a big deal the book was (the class, after all, was on Roth’s career), and even had them read the crap Marie Syrkin and Irving Howe wrote about it in the interest of revivifying that history, but to no avail. It just didn’t move them. The Comedy class was hit or miss, as gen-ed classes often are; we had some great discussions, but Portnoy’s Complaint again failed to deliver, even though I made a point of not talking about the controversy. Actually, a few students were drawn to the great passage in which young Alex wonders whether all the Portnoys are screaming at each other because he has eaten his sister’s pudding or because his father has screwed the shikse receptionist at work with the dynamite legs, but that got things going only for a little while. I should also admit that our discussion of the book occasioned the single best student paper title I’ve ever come across: “How Does Philip Roth Know My Mother Ruined My Life?” But in all, covering the book in class was not much better than pulling teeth. Discussion in the survey, which was in so many respects a really great class, started great, with a rollicking good discussion on the first day we took up the book. But then it, too, fell...