As sent to someone:
Portnoy’s Complaint isn’t a comic novel.
We begin with (uncomfortable?) laughs, but, if you think about it, the novel is really framed as a disturbing case study. The guy’s trapped. He hates himself. He feels himself a basic failure. But that’s all couched in his crazy verbal energy. So calling it comic, I say, mistakes surface for depth.
The last line, paraphrase, “Now vee begin “ isn’t a punchline. It’s the beginning after the end of pain as entertainment coming from an emotionally deformed man in need of psychiatry. Comedy affirms life, but all of Portnoy’s verbal brilliance points to his neediness. So the shrink’s last line is Roth’s closing judgment as to Portnoy’s need for a therapeutic beginning.
Early stuff busts decorum, as you noted. But as we go on, don’t the jokes wear thin, morph into a relentless tirade as Portnoy’s “stand up” devolves to a narration of his coming apart leading to his impotence? Isn’t this in his case—case used advisedly— the failure of humour as salve, of what gets us through?
Portnoy is what? Self-obsessed to a neurotic fault, mother-obsessed, sexually lousy with Jewish women, finally impotent in Israel—“tapioca.” So insight, growth, release? I think not. He’s arrested development. What’s his worth? He’s couch-worthy, shrink-worthy.
So my overall sense is that the comedy, the jokes, the verbal fucking around, typically seen as the way to get past, get over, bracket, trauma, essentially highlight but can’t resolve what ails him. In the end, the comedy is Portnoy howling.
Consider him and The Monkey, Mary Jane Reed, left by him in Greece after their fraught relationship and her self-destroying trip to Europe with him.
Portnoy calls her "The Monkey" due to her sexual agility and "depraved" appetite. But he actually is contemptuous of her due to her lesser intellect evident in part in her bad spelling.
Trying to fulfill his fantasies, he gets her to agree to a threesome in Rome with a prostitute. But it leaves her devastated and self loathing. She accuses him of trying to debase her to his level of depravity.
So, in Athens, she becomes suicidal and threatens to jump from their hotel balcony. Unable to cope with either her instability or his own guilt, Portnoy deserts her and runs off to Israel. He never sees her again.
Not a lot of laughs.
So what comes after this degeneracy and his howling? Paraphrase, “Now vee begin.”
What’s a comic novel, anyway? There are academic definitions galore. But really, maybe cutting through all that, isn’t it one that’s meant to be light and fun in its effect? Pickwick. Jeeves. We read them joyfully. They delight us. Comedy in a novel in the service of something deeper, darker, more serious, emotionally wrecked, even pathetic, doesn’t make for a comic novel.
