To a friend:
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 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.
And what comes after the 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 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.
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