Portnoy's Complaint (Vintage International)

Portnoy's Complaint (Vintage International) is written by Philip Roth and is all about the joys and trials of growing up in the United States as a Jew in the forties and fifties. It is set in 1966 and the plot revolves round Alexander Portnoy, who is a successful civil servant. He approaches a psychiatrist to get rid of his inferiority, Oedipal and sexual fetish complexes. Alexander was severely criticised, while also being put on a pedestal by his parents as he grew up. The book examines the struggle of growing up with overbearing parents. Alex is all of thirty-three but is still a bachelor thanks to the neuroses bestowed upon him by his parents. The book explores a disorder wherein altruistic and ethical impulses are in constant conflict with perverse sexual longings. Roth does not portray the protagonist of his story as a hero.

The book is a prime example of Jewish-American literature in the 1960s, along with Saul Bellow's Herzog. Portnoy's Complaint (Vintage International) is available in paperback. The reprint edition was published by Vintage in 1994.