Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9696 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Guardian
'The most outrageously funny book about sex yet written'

Jewish Renaissance
`scabrous language and fantastic comic energy'

The Week
'Forty years after it was first published, this is still a shocking book - obscene, hilarious and beautifully written'

Customer Reviews

Very funny
I read this book in high school and found it very funny. It gave me an insight into teenage boys (and some of my later male friends) that I don't think I would have had otherwise. It is self-indulgent and a bit disgusting in some places, but I remember it as a good read.

Even in 2007 this is a great book!!
First, please do not be put off by the reviewer who states this book does not hold up in 2007. It does.
I read this book about 6 months ago and could not put it down. It's hysterically funny, it will make you cringe, and yes, even in 2007, it will shock you.
I've never written a review on Amazon before, but when I saw that someone had only given this book one star I had to give me opinion!! I'm not the world's biggest Phillip Roth fan by any stretch, but I read Portnoy's Complaint after I came accross it in a second hand book shop. It's clearly completely self-indulgent on Roth's part, but why not? In this case self-indulgence makes it all the more engaging and enjoyable to read. You will want to slap Portnoy accross the face, but you'll also want to see just exactly what idiotic and disgraceful things he'll do next.
Read this, you won't regret it!

Portnoy's Whinge!
Do not read this book unless you feel that you will be entertained by 274 pages of tedious, self-loathing and pointless pop-psychology.

At times this book reads like a straightforward transcript from some imagined psychiatrists couch, although most self respecting psychiatrists would have told Portnoy to get a life by the end of chapter one!

It is also inherently anti-Semitic in a way that only a book written by a Jew about Jewish culture and society could get away with.

I stuck with it to the bitter end in case anything interesting happened; sadly nothing did as the character lurched from one bout of self loathing to the next.

If anyone other than Philip Roth had written this then it would probably have ended up on one of the many vanity publishing websites that plague the Web.

There is fine prose in places as one would expect from someone like Roth, but overall this has the feel of a commissioned piece, or the fulfilment of a book deal commitment rather than great literature. As a book this is a massive piece of self-indulgence.

Overall a passingly useful insight into a very caricatured view of Jewish life, with quite a few Yiddish words that I didn't know, most of them scatological. As a book it doesn't seem to try hard to do anything other than dump the authors problems on the reader; it isn't funny, it certainly isn't erotic, and overall I can't really recommend it!

Sorry Philip, it may have been hip in 1969 but in 2007 it just reads like a little boy trying to see how many dirty words he can get away with using.