A succès de scandale if ever there was one, Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth’s fourth book of fiction, will soon be 45 years old. At the center of the novel’s scandalousness, which recounts the 33-year-old Alexander Portnoy’s reporting to his psychoanalyst the emergence of his repressed desires growing up in a middle-class Jewish home, was its emphasis on masturbation, or “the secret vice,” as the Victorian medical encyclopedias used to call it. The novel’s last sentence, spoken by the analyst, Dr. Spielvogel, reads: “Now veee may perhaps to begin. Yes?”
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