Portnoy's Complaint

By Philip Roth

Categories: Literature & Fiction

Philip Roth's 1969 novel is the confession of Alexander Portnoy, a thirty-three-year-old assistant commissioner for human opportunity in New York, told to his silent psychoanalyst. In a long comic monologue, Portnoy pours out his sexual obsessions, his guilt and his rage at his smothering Jewish mother and anxious father. The book caused a sensation when it appeared and made Roth famous.

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• Barack Obama: “Some of the great books by Jewish authors like Philip Roth or Saul Bellow, they are steeped with this sense of being an outsider, longing to get in, not sure what you're giving up — what you're willing to give up and what you're not willing to give up.”