Rating: 
Summary: A great book for a weekend read
Review: I couldn't help feel that this book expressed the angst and emotion of a man confused, but wholly aware of his world. Mr. Roth gives us a glimpse into the life of a man driven by his phallus and the guilt surrounding it. Though one could easily place this on the shelf with "Books Men Identify With"-the second chapter dedicated to the subject of 'Whacking Off'-I found it most entertaining. I am a fan of Mr. Roth's writings and recommend SABBATH'S THEATER as well.
Rating: 
Summary: A True Study of Jewish Home Life
Review: This book is a beautifully honest and fair portrayal of the sights, sounds, and emotions of a 1950's - 1960's New York area Jewish home. Sophie Portnoy is the Jewish mother archetype - so true to life in fact, that I literally trembled whenever she spoke. The "Jewish view" of the gentile world, particularly Alex's view of shiksas (tartan, nose structure, etc.), is equally compelling and honest. In its time, the autosexual and sexual passages took "ganze chutspah" from Roth, but again the result was the same - truth. An extremely entertaining novel of brutal honesty.
Rating:
Summary: "Good Boy"
Review: Certainly no complaint in the literary saviore faire of Roth. Alexander Portnoy recounts his sexuality from an immature, devilish child's mind to a cunning, sinister's grown-up's ponderings. Roth is relentless in his satire and beautifully paints a common picture between appetite and morality. The start of the book is akin to a cold engine on a Midwestern January morning- slow to get going. But as soon as you are in gear, Alexander Portnoy reveals his aberrant desire captured by his tortured libido. As he grows older he is more cynical and Roth slightly overplays, but in the end nicely wraps it up and offers it as his present.We are lucky to be the recipients
Rating:
Summary: OY-VEY! What Brilliance!
Review: Never has a book spoken to me so directly and urgently as Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint." I don't want to imply that I am an Alexander Portnoy but I have to admit there's a lot of me in this character.
The book is a revelation. First of all, it's not merely about sex. It seems the publishers want everyone to believe that's the main topic so once they're in the door they'll read over all this Jewish crap to get to the juicy bits. Well there are plenty of juicy bits but the book is first and foremost about the Jewish American consciousness. Just as Bigger Thomas doesn't stand for every African American, Alexander Portnoy doesn't stand for every Jew - however there's a lot of him in us. While other books on this topic seem to concentrate on the Holocaust and its effects or the conflict between the sacred and secular, Roth's book is able to not only encompass all these themes but go far beyond them and paint a picture that is so realistic and familiar that the only response is painful laughter.
Just as the sign says at Sea World, "You Will Get Wet," there should be a sign on this book, "You Will Laugh." Rarely has any text made me laugh out loud to the degree this one has - however, the jokes work so well because of the underlying truths here. After the laughter's over, you aren't just left with a headache. You actually gain insight into your own life, the lives of your family and the Jewish people in America. Even if you aren't one of The Tribe, you'll have a very enjoyable experience and be left with insight into a prominent cultural group and - yes - human sexuality.
I just can't heap enough approbation on this book. Turn off your computer right now and read this book. I'm serious. NOW!
Rating:
Summary: Roth's best- An American classic
Review: I have never laughed out loud at a book the way I laughed out loud when reading this book many many years ago. It contains the essence and best of Philip Roth .And while he has developed new themes and new relationships in subsequent writing, the heart of what he is expressed in the most condensed and comical way is in this book.
Aside from the comedy the book has a deeply poetic and moving quality. The word he himself uses is ' poignance' and I think this work is filled with this.
The book is ethnically rich in its portrayal of a Jewish family but in religious terms it is as empty as Roth himself is.
I say this because my reading of the book has always brought great pleasure and with it a certain guilt. And this guilt relates to my understanding that Roth really is 'coming down on the Jewish world he also loves' but at the same time ignoring and devaluating another dimension of Jewish communal experience.
I think though that for most readers, Jewish or not, this book will be a tremendously enjoyable read.
I believe furthermore that this book catches a certain time and spirit in America. In my mind it belongs with 'The Great Gatsby ' and ' Catcher in the Rye' as one of the twentieth century's contributions to the most living American literature.
Rating:
Summary: The Funniest Book I have Ever Read
Review: Yes it is true. Portnoy's Complaint had me laughing out loud for the entire read. It has been about three years since I have read it, but I still remember it vividly. It is a remarkable page turner. The best way to describe this is Catcher in the Rye meets Woody Allen. This book tops all of David Sedaris' writing combined! If you have not read this, you are missing a brilliant hilarious classic.
Rating:
Summary: A Jewish Boy's Sexual Struggle
Review: This is a very funny account of a Jewish young man who is torn growing up between the "good-boy" mentality of his sheltered obsessive-compulsive family, and the strong sexual cravings of a [excited] teenager and (later) worldly man with lots of unfulfilled sexual desires and fantasies.
In fact, "Portnoy's Complaint" is now a psychological term used to describe this struggle of repressed sexuality.
But on a broader scale, this book is also many other things, among them: a fair (and true) indictment of Jewish life, insecurities, and self-pity; the hilarity of "American Pie"; and every possible thing Freud could ever think of! Enjoy.
Rating:
Summary: Now everything can be illuminated
Review: I wasn't sure of what I should expect when I started reading Philip Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint". Something that I knew what that it couldn't be a bad book -- Roth, one of the best North American writers ever, would never write a bad novel. But from what I had read about this book people seemed to be a little uncomfortable with its thematic.
No sooner did I read some twenty pages than I realized that in truth this one of the most misunderstood books of American Literature -- more or less a cousin of Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita". Readers are usually too concerned with the sexual thematic that they forget or simply miss about the other subjects.
Most of the readers are very focused on the sexual content. It may play a fair part in the development of "Portnoy's Complaint"'s narrative, but it is not the only subject. At it is root, the novel is an unusual Bildungsroman -- than kind of novel that follows the moral and physical bring up of a young man. This time we are talking about Alexander Portnoy --the man behind the myth. As the book explain there is a disorder named after him.
For almost 300 pages, we follow the Portnoy family complicated dynamics with a control freak mother, a weak father, a nice daughter and a teenager son fueled with testosterone. The son's, Alex, stories are amazingly funny and critical. When first you laugh for what he said, in the next page you're taken aback for his critical view of family, religion and society.
Roth is a master of portraying the young Jew's angst. Not only his main character, Portnoy, has the same problems every young man has, but he also has a Jewish mother. Part of the time the son-mother relationship is the dorsal spine of the novel. But the writer's words do beyond it.
Since "Portnoy's Complaint" hasn't received so much kudos as "Lolita", people feel easy to say all kind of nasty and incoherent things about this novel. Many readers approach to Roth's novel already prepared to face a sexual journey of a young man -- painted with the dirties paints. They couldn't be more wrong. This is a work of extreme sensibility that not many writers would be able to write. Of course, this novel is not recommended to everyone --only for those who like good literature, with content and not only shape.
The Vintage edition has a new afterword written by Philip Roth for the twenty-five anniversary. Not only are they illuminating but also a jewel for giving readers the chance see what the writer thinks of his novel 25 years later. And we see that Roth is still a master --even 25 years later.
Rating: 
Summary: I HAVE A COMPLAINT!
Review: When I finally decided to read Portnoy's Complaint, I was excited by the reviews I'd read. I thought I'd love it. For a while, I did love it - I was on the verge of recommending it to friends. Then, about a hundred pages in, it got tedious. I realized that this is a one-note novel. Alexander Portnoy keeps saying different versions of the same thing over and over again. His rant (this book is simply one long rant) ceases to be insightful or illuminating or even funny - he just becomes ANNOYING. Hundreds of pages of kvetch, kvetch, kvetch. Not for nothing, ALL parents mess their children up. To have this guy in his thirties still blaming his poor parents for everything that is wrong in his life - and with such gravity - simply makes him a loser. That is the book's critical flaw - Alex Portnoy is not a likeable character. I hated spending time with him - he's obnoxious. He goes on and on about how noble he is, how liberal, how enlightened, how smart, how educated, how moral, yadda, yadda, yadda. This does not stop him from spouting countless racial, anti-religious, and homophobic stereotypes. I can't understand why this book is as well-respected as it is. Maybe it was original at the time it was published; now it just comes across as DATED. And I consider myself its target audience too! Similar material has been mined with better results in film by Woody Allen - and even on television by George Costanza! I know this review is not going to be popular - this book is a bit of a sacred cow. I just couldn't finish it.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Too Many Complaints Here
Review: Like Charles Dickens, I had great expectations for this book. Well let me clarify that, Charles Dickens was fairly dead before this book was written and had he been alive, he may or may not had the desire to pick Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint", so let me qualify. Hearing the glowing reviews and seeing the listmania lists placing Roth's "Complaint" as a must read had me fairly in a frenzy to read this one. Does it stand out as a truly unique must-read from all the more than mediocre literature out there? I don't think so. That's not to say it has achieved mediocrity, it is somewhat above that. What a reader gets from "Portnoy's Complaint," is a window inside the psyche of a Jewish American boy come boy-man smothered by a truly overbearing mother and plagues throughout life by a sexual obsession that keeps him from being committed to a human relationship. His commitments seem to be centered around desires emanating somewhere about his mid-region and early on seem to be mostly of the self-satisfactory kind. This translates into adulthood to a dogged pursuit of shallow relationships with WASP-ish women. So, there is plenty of Freud infused throughout. And interestingly enough it transmogrifies into Jung, with Alexander Portnoy grasping the collective unconscious of his Jewish ethnicity getting back at the established American gentility through sex. If any of this makes you squeamish, you may want to steer clear. It was a book that definitely pushed the boundaries of the time in the 1960's but then again there was a whole cultural movement all about pushing the boundaries back then. However, like most boundary pushers of the times, we seemed to have lowered our tolerance for the racy and compared to literature today of the same ilk, Portnoy is fairly tame. Do you have to be Jewish to really "get" this book? Well, I'm not and there was probably 10% of the book that went right over or around my head. Yiddish references were completely lost on me, but through repeat word usage most readers can probably get the gist. Portnoy's is kind of like a mix of Woody Allen and Henry Miller. It's short and written with an inner voice of a psychotherapy recipient spewing forth from the coach of self-analysis. It's a good piece of literature, but I'm not so sure about a great one. Read this is you are interested in what it may be like to be a Jewish-American man growing up in an oppressive family atmosphere. Read this if you want a good chuckle at sometimes raunchy but talented writing. If these things don't appeal to you at this time, move on to other reads on your list of literary desires.
--MMW
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