Perhaps only Harold Pinter, to whom, as a young man, Roth bore some resemblance, could have framed such a memorable and outrageous line. This is the “talking cure” Freud never envisaged, a manic monologue, to quote its author, by “a lust-ridden, mother-addicted, young Jewish bachelor”, a farcical tirade that would put “the id back in yid”. Let us not forget, in honouring Roth’s exit, that to facilitate his solitary passion, Portnoy commands a far richer arsenal of sex aids than most horny young men: old socks, his sister’s underwear, a baseball glove and – notoriously – a slice of liver for the Portnoy family dinner.
A novel in the guise of a confession, it was taken by many American readers as a confession in the guise of a novel: Portnoy became an immediate bestseller and a succès fou. This “shocking” novel is now more than 60 years old, but some readers still haven’t got over his brilliant, comic exploration of a young man’s frustrated sex drive, especially as it might relate to an Jewish-American boy’s mother. As Roth, who died last week, at the age of 85 – just a few days after another master of American prose, Tom Wolfe – glides into the literary pantheon, those first two worries have become irrelevant or trivial, but that frustration with the legacy of Portnoy was prescient.
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