Portnoy’s Complaint was published by Random House, New York, on 12 January 1969, in a first printing of approximately 20,000 copies priced at $6.95. The novel was an immediate, explosive bestseller — selling over 400,000 copies in its first year and generating a cultural controversy that would pursue Roth for the rest of his career. It was banned in Australia and attacked as obscene, anti-Semitic, and self-hating. It made Roth the most talked-about novelist in America.
The Novel
The entire novel is a monologue delivered by Alexander Portnoy — a thirty-three-year-old Jewish lawyer, Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity for the City of New York — to his psychoanalyst, Dr. Spielvogel. Portnoy confesses his childhood (dominated by his overbearing mother Sophie and his constipated, browbeaten father), his compulsive masturbation (legendary in its inventiveness and frequency), his sexual relationships with gentile women (whom he calls “shikses”), and his paralysing guilt about all of it.
The novel is ferociously funny — Roth’s comic energy here is at full throttle, the monologue building in speed and desperation like a jazz solo that cannot find its resolution. Portnoy’s voice — intelligent, self-lacerating, hilariously articulate about his own neuroses — is one of the great comic voices in American fiction. The famous last line — after 274 pages of confession, Spielvogel finally speaks: “Now vee may perhaps to begin. Yes?” — is a devastating punchline that transforms the entire novel into a preamble.
But beneath the comedy is genuine anguish. Portnoy is trapped — between desire and guilt, between American freedom and Jewish identity, between love and contempt for his parents. His compulsive sexuality is not liberation but imprisonment; his articulateness does not produce self-knowledge but generates an infinite regress of self-justification.
Collecting Portnoy’s Complaint
First edition (1969, Random House): Approximately 20,000 copies, priced at $6.95.
Identification points:
- “First Printing” on the copyright page
- Published by Random House
- Number line ending in “2” (Random House’s practice for first printing)
- Orange/red cloth boards
First edition, first printing:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $500–$1,500
- Near Fine in jacket: $200–$500
- Without jacket: $30–$80
Signed copies: Roth signed regularly at events until his retirement in 2012. Signed first editions: $800–$2,000. Roth’s death in 2018 closed the signature supply.
Value trajectory (2016–2026): Approximately 1.5× for fine copies in jacket. Roth’s death and his growing canonical recognition (many critics now consider him the greatest post-war American novelist) support steady appreciation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Portnoy Philip Roth? Partly. The biographical parallels are obvious (Newark Jewish upbringing, overbearing mother, intellectual son), but Roth spent his career insisting on the distinction between author and character. The novel is a performance of autobiography, not autobiography itself.
Is this anti-Semitic? Many Jewish readers and critics thought so at the time. Roth argued that comedy requires freedom — that his novel satirises not Jews but the specific neuroses produced by a specific American Jewish milieu. The debate has never been fully resolved.
Is this still funny? The comedy depends on sexual and ethnic candour that was revolutionary in 1969 and has since become commonplace. For readers who can adjust to the context, the novel remains wildly, devastatingly funny.