Portnoy's Complaint: It's about Race, Not Sex (Even the Sex Is about Race)

This essay explores the politics of race in Philip Roth's 1969 novel, Portnoy's Complaint. The article adopts a revisionist stance, arguing that besides the novel's overt intergenerational conflicts, Portnoy's Complaint is also informed by and responsive to the politics of race and the ethics of cultural recognition in play during its writing and at the time of its publication. Notably, the novel is partly set during the 1960s, when black and Jewish interests caused friction between the two groups in New York. At the center of this fiction, as New York City's assistant attorney general for civil rights, is Alexander Portnoy. The essay's first section discusses Roth's research files (housed at the Library of Congress) on the New York City Commission on Human Rights, and the corresponding fictional Commission for which Portnoy is assistant attorney general. Roth's research on the NYCCHR established key contexts and scenarios for the novel. The second section explores how Portnoy's sexual predicaments and subsequent anxieties are structured variously by longing for and loathing of racial difference. A comparison of Portnoy with Eldridge Cleaver's contemporaneous memoir Soul on Ice draws out Roth's narrative intertwining of sex and race. Finally, the third section of this essay explores how Portnoy critiques the ethical bases of civil and human rights.