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By Root 7608 0

down to the office, take a look through my In basket any morning of the week, I’ll show you pigs! The things that other men do—and get away with! And with never a second thought! To inflict a wound upon a defenseless person makes them smile, for Christ’s sake, gives a little lift to their day! The lying, the scheming, the bribing, the thieving—the larceny, Doctor, conducted without batting an eye. The indifference! The total moral indifference! They don’t come down from the crimes they commit with so much as a case of indigestion! But me, I dare to steal a slightly unusual kind of a hump, and while away on my vacation—and now I can’t get it up! I mean, God forbid I should tear the tag from my mattress that says, “Do Not Remove Under Penalty of Law”—what would they give me for that, the chair? It makes me want to scream, the ridiculous disproportion of the guilt! May I? Will that shake them up too much out in the waiting room? Because that’s maybe what I need most of all, to howl. A pure howl, without any more words between me and it! “This is the police speaking. You’re surrounded, Portnoy. You better come on out and pay your debt to society.” “Up society’s ass, Copper!” “Three to come out with those hands of yours up in the air, Mad Dog, or else we come in after you, guns blazing. One,” “Blaze, you bastard cop, what do I give a shit? I tore the tag off my mattress—” “Two.” “—But at least while I lived, I lived big!”

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!!!!!

PUNCH LINE

So [said the doctor]. Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?

In 1997, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998, he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and, in 2002, he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005, The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004.” He has also won American PEN’s two highest awards: the PEN/Nabokov and the PEN/Bellow. He is the only living American novelist to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. The last of nine volumes is scheduled for publication in 2013.

The famous confession of Alexander Portnoy, who is thrust through life by his unappeasable sexuality, yet held back at the same time by the iron grip of his unforgettable childhood. Hilariously funny, boldly intimate, startlingly candid, Portnoy’s Complaint was an immediate bestseller upon its publication in 1969, and is perhaps Roth’s best-known book.

As Portnoy endeavors to satisfy his inextinguishable desires, he’s overcome by Portnoy’s Complaint: “(pôrt´-noiz kəm-pl´nt´) n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933 - )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: ‘Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful: as a consequence of the patient’s ‘morality,’ however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.’ (Spielvogel, O. “The Puzzled Penis,” Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV p. 909.) It is believed by Speilvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds in the mother-child relationship.”

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, SEPTEMBER 1994

Copyright © 1967, 1968, 1969, 1994, by Philip Roth

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