Thus begins my entirely unnecessary, mildly illuminating, quasi-perverse close reading of the notorious adventures of Alexander Portnoy, “the Raskolnikov of jerking off.”Įven in the book’s earliest pages, we are made painfully aware of the strong connection between food and identity for Alex-both Jewish identity (we’re talking specifically about kosher food here-in fact later some his bouts of masturbation will be disguised as diarrhea and blamed on hamburgers and fries found in the wild), and his mother’s identity, which at the time has not fully separated from Alex’s own. How does it go, and is it actually important to the book? That is: how does the legend compare to the text? So to celebrate the birthday of a classic, I have decided to revisit that famous epithet-creating masturbatory moment. Tomorrow, Portnoy’s Complaint turns 50 (yes, it was published in 1969, so I offer you the obligatory nice), and I wondered: what really happens in that scene with the liver? I certainly couldn’t remember. Ivory is the soap that floats Rice Krispies the breakfast cereal that goes snap-crackle-pop Philip Roth the Jew who masturbates with a piece of liver. There is Ivory Soap, Rice Krispies, and Philip Roth. Soon after its publication, it had sold millions of copies, and the notion of a young man and his liver had become a reliable punchline-and in some ways, so had Roth. In 1981, Roth told an interviewer at Esquire that “to become a celebrity is to become a brand name. The book was highly controversial-loudly reviled and just as loudly praised-but most importantly: it was read. Portnoy’s Complaint was not Philip Roth’s first novel, but it was the one that turned him into a celebrity.

That’s how ingrained and repeated in our cultural consciousness it is. It’s Portnoy’s Complaint, the book where the kid masturbates with the liver. Even if you’ve actually read Roth’s novel (though like me, it may have been years ago), you still might only remember the thing about the liver.

If you know one thing about Portnoy’s Complaint, it’s probably the thing about the liver.

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