Portnoy's Complaint
Began: Mon Sep 2, 2024 (which was Labor Day) Complete: ?
- 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.”