Portnoy's Complaint
Began: Mon Sep 2, 2024 (which was Labor Day) Complete: ? Sept 20
- this novel might be too darn filthy to take notes on.
p.33
“Hamburgers, she says bitterly, just as she might say Hilter, “where they can put anything in the world in that they want - and he eats them.”
- this novel is also absolutely hilarious.
- Alex is sent running to the drug store to get Kotex:
Why was this woman so grossly insensitive to the vulnerability of her own little boy—on the one hand so insensitive to my shame, and yet on the other, so attuned to my deepest desires!
On baseball and the essential qualities of being human:
Because it wasn’t, you see, that one was the best center fielder imaginable, only that one knew exactly, and down to the smallest particular, how a center fielder should conduct himself. And there are people like that walking the streets of the U.S. of A. I ask you, why can’t I be one! Why can’t I exist now as I existed for the Seabees out there in center field! Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder-—and nothing more!
9/13/24, 1:41:58 PM
It's been awhile since I've written here. But this novel keeps getting grittier and more like the forbidden fruit. Is it pornographic? They say you'll know it when you see it - and I don't see it here. But it's racy and lewd.
- p.135-50: this feels like the center of the novel: Alex and his Monkey in Greece and Italy. And the issue of consent (Roth never would’ve used that term).
- and then the ruminating on his forever outsider status as not a real American. At Christmas time. “No, no, these blond-haired Christians are the legitimate residents and owners of this place, and they can pump any song they want into the streets and no one is going to stop them either.”
9/18/24, 1:54:02 PM
- I see myself in Portnoy’s contempt at the prospect of The Monkey being a sex worker. He’s both aware of, and completely blind to, his own proclivities. Maybe he’s all too aware of them - but will only hold hers against her - because of some idealized version of feminity to which he secretly subscribes.
Doorknocking for Stevenson while in college, in Ohio, describes his Pumpkin as such:
I might have learned something spending the rest of my life with such a person. Yes, I might—if I could learn something! If I could be somehow sprung from this obsession with fellatio and fornication, from romance and fantasy and revenge—from the settling of scores! the pursuit of dreams! from this hopeless, senseless loyalty to the long ago!
and The Pumpkin is from Iowa. In a nod to Roth’s having despised the state where he taught for 2 years. Davenport.
“I was on the staff of the House subcommittee investigating the television quiz scandals.” Is Portnoy for real???