The Psychology of 'Portnoy'

Already in 1967, the same year When She Was Good came out, the first samples of Portnoy’s Complaint were issued in wide-circulation magazines like Esquire and Sport, as well as the highbrow Partisan Review. Indeed, it was there, in that mainstay of the New York intelligentsia, that Roth signaled his departure from the magazine’s austere norms with the chapter entitled “Whacking Off.” Solotaroff’s new paperback journal New American Review ran two excerpted chapters of the novel, the first almost two years before the book’s appearance, the second numbering no fewer than twenty-eight thousand words.