Character Description At Its Finest

My first experience with Philip Roth was American Pastoral. I loved the book.

Roth’s storytelling and writing style just blew me away.

Portnoy’s Complaint is a completely different style of novel, written a few decades before American Pastoral.

And it’s graphic. Really graphic. Almost all of it in a sexual nature. Shocking in some places. Roth’s narrator, Alexander Portnoy, uses variations of words I’m unsure I’ve ever heard before. It’s a little overdone, in my view, but I can see the forest through the trees and still appreciate Roth’s writing style.

If you can get past the lewdness, and there’s a lot of it, this can be a funny book. One particular scene from early on stands out to me.

Alex is Jewish, but has been turned off to the faith by his crazy mother, who is a devout Jew. She treats their Rabbi as if he’s the King of England, so when he shows up to see her at the hospital, Alex’s mom just about passes out from excitement. It’s a celebrity!

Alex explains his disgust:

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