Review of Portnoy's Complaint
by Maxwell Joslyn. .
Portnoy's Complaint
5
out of What Does The Score "4.0" Mean?
Good: Left a unique impression on me, and excels in multiple areas of written composition. Gets prioritized when digitizing my notes and excerpts.-
Because this city, as we know, is alive with girls wholly unlike Mary Jane Reed, promising, unbroken, uncontaminated young women--healthy, in fact, as milkmaids. I know, because these were her predecessors--only they didn't satisfy, either. They were wrong, too. Spielvogel, believe me, I've been there, I've tried: I've eaten their casseroles and shaved in their johns, I've been given duplicate keys to their police locks and shelves of my own in the medicine cabinet, I have even befriended those cats of theirs--named Spinoza and Clytemnestra and Candide and Cat--yes, yes, clever and erudite girls, fresh from successful adventures in sex and scholarship at wholesome Ivy League colleges, lively, intelligent, self-respecting, self-assured, and well-behaved young women--social workers and research assistants, schoolteachers and copy readers, girls in whose company I did not feel abject or ashamed, girls I did not have to father or mother or educate or redeem. And they didn't work out, either! pg 215
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Christ, yes, this [Kay Campbell] was one of the great shikses. I might have learned something spending the rest of my life with such a person. Yes, I might--if I could learn something! If I could somehow be torn away from this obsession with fellatio and fornication, from romance and fantasy and revenge--from the settling of scores! the pursuit of dreams! from this hopeless, senseless loyalty to the long ago! pg 219
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I cannot imagine myself living out my life any other place but here. Why leave, why go, when there is everything here that I will ever want? The ridiculing, the joking, the acting-up, the pretending--anything for a laugh! I love it! And yet underneath it all, they mean it, they are dead earnest. You should see them at the end of the seven innings when that dollar has to change hands. Don't tell me they don't mean it! Losing and winning is not a joke ... and yet it is! And that's what charms me most of all. Fierce as the competition is, they cannot resist clowning and kibbitzing around. Putting on a show! How I am going to love growing up to be a Jewish man! Living forever in the Weequahic section, and playing softball on Chancellor Avenue from nine to one on Sundays, a perfect joining of clown and competitor, kibbitzing wiseguy and dangerous long-ball hitter. pg 243-244