Volume 12, Number 4 · February 27, 1969
Up Against the Wall, Mama!
By Alfred Kazin
Portnoy's Complaint
by Philip Roth
Random House, 274 pp., $6.95
Alex Portnoy of Newark, who is all complaint and therefore a very funny case, is the latest and most vivid example of the tendency among American Jews to reduce their experience to psychology. Of course many non-Jews in America do this, too: in a country so crammed and lively with jostling human styles, languages, traditions, races, it is most practical as well as sophisticated to recognize one's role, to see on every hand how different a role can be. But to young American Jews, who in this most smashing of times and countries often feel that they have been born not to faith but to a neurosis, a 'condition,' a burden, a complaint, the proximity of psychoanalysis often seems the only liberation from the monotony of Jew, Jew, Jewish. No Jew in his senses still believes that the Revolution will do anything for Jews as Jews (or even for Jews as anti-Jews, pace the ghosts of Trotsky, Zinoviev, Stansky, etc., etc.). But psychoanalysis will not refuse Jew or Greek, is nevertheless clinical perspective and distance, and hints not only of a new consciousness to come, but of bridges to creativity. That is why the Jew as raucous vulgarian (Groucho), as parodist of the genteel culture (Perelman), as existentialist (Bellow), as martyr (Malamud), has been succeeded by so many Jews in show business who sound as if they had rewritten the third act in consultation with the analyst.
Review, 1342 words
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