Portnoy's Complaint

Before reading Portnoy's Complaint, I'd read two books by Philip Roth: The Plot Against America, and American Pastoral. I really liked them both, although I preferred the latter. The former is about the life of a New Jersey Jewish family in the 1950s, during an alternate reality in which Lindbergh was elected President of the United States. The latter is about the life of a New Jersey Jew during the explosive 1960s.

Needless to say, when I picked up Portnoy's Complaint, I had absolutely no idea that Roth could be funny. And in this book, we're talking laugh-out-loud funny! The entire book is told in the first person to the psychiatrist of a very sexually-disfunctional Jewish guy from New Jersey (trend here?), the root of whose problems probably lie in his boyhood relationship with his mother. Regardless, it's a funny, funny book. I am wildly impressed with the versatility of Roth's writing - this was an unexpected pleasure.