Portnoy's Complaint

Alex starts to describe how he once masturbated while riding the bus. He wonders whether eating lobster for the first time inspired him to do such a thing. Lobster is not kosher, the Jewish dietary laws that Alex and his family follow. Alex speculates about whether his father had an affair though he admits that this may be conjecture. The thought of his overbearing parents worries him constantly, especially as his mother has always told him that he is brilliant. The responsibility of being intelligent—and especially more intelligent than his sister Hannah—has bothered Alex for a long time, though Hannah never seems angry with him. Alex shares stories about his mother’s transgressions, such as the time she ate lobster without knowing. These stories are the “literature of [his] childhood” (47). After the first few years of his life when he and his mother were home together all day, Alex began to feel pressure from his mother to succeed in his career, his romantic endeavors, and his social life. This pressure persists in the current day. His mother and her friends constantly brag to each other about their children’s success. Likewise, his father always asks him if he has a serious girlfriend. Alex cannot bring himself to marry any one woman, as his various sexual fantasies make the thought of monogamy a terrifying prospect.

Alex is relatively successful in his career. He is Assistant Commissioner for The City of New York Commission on Human Opportunity, but his parents still want him to move back to Newark. He believes that they do not care about the prestige of his position or his professional accomplishments. For years, Alex’s father has sold life insurance policies and his mother has fretted about Alex’s future. Alex says he just wants his parents to leave him alone and denies having any Freudian sexual fantasies regarding his mother. He knows that he can never tell her about the breadth and depravity of his sexual thoughts, including a homosexual experience he once had.

Returning to the story of masturbating on the bus, Alex shares a very detailed account of the incident with his therapist. He refers to the incident as a “pantomime” (63) and says it was not the first time that he did such a thing in a public place. He even had a special technique that he devised for these situations, which occurred frequently in his “full and wonderful life of utter degradation” (64). He shares that while still underage, he once visited a burlesque show. After sitting in the audience and masturbating, he watched an older man do the same.

Alex mentions The Monkey, his nickname for one of the women in his life who has been pressuring him—like his mother—to get married. He recalls a time they took a vacation to Europe, where they hired an Italian sex worker. While The Monkey told Alex that she fantasized about this scenario, she regretted the decision and blamed Alex for allowing her to enter what she believed to be a sexually degrading situation. Afterward, Alex was taken aback by her “pathetic weeping” (68). Despite the argument, they hired the same sex worker the following night, and they argued again afterward. When they were in Athens, The Monkey threatened to jump from the hotel balcony unless Alex married her. He refused and left her there. In the following months, The Monkey threatened to call Alex’s colleagues whenever they argued to tell them about the sex worker.

Alex describes how Christmas trees and decorations remind him that he is Jewish and not Christian. However, women in the wintertime delight Alex. Winter was fraught growing up; when his father was delayed by snow coming home from the office, his mother would quickly assume the worst. Alex would then worry that if his father died, he would have to get a job to support his mother. This worry spiraled into a larger anxiety over his employability as a Jewish person, and he wondered whether he should change his name to hide his Jewish roots. Alex laments that though he could change his name, he could not hide his nose which he feels is a telltale sign of his Jewishness. However, his mother assured him that his large nose gave his face character.

Alex tells his therapist more about The Monkey. She came from an abusive, gentile family and moved to New York at 18. For a brief time, she was married to an older, rich, French man who moved her to Paris and lavished her with jewelry and dental surgery. He also regularly hired a sex worker to “squat naked upon a glass coffee table and take a crap while the tycoon lay flat on his back, directly beneath the table” (76) and asked The Monkey to sit and watch from a nearby sofa. She left the industrialist and returned to New York. When she and Alex met, they impressed each other with their insatiable sexual appetites. During their first date, Alex worried that he was entering some sort of trap. Alex believes that his Jewishness was a relief for The Monkey after her turbulent romantic past, as it offered her the promise of a stable life.

During his early sexual encounters, Alex worried that the condoms he carried with him might break during sex, and he tested their durability by filling them with water and wearing them while masturbating. A short time later, Alex rode in a delivery truck with his soon-to-be brother-in-law, Morty. While riding in the truck, Alex felt free and reborn. Morty’s “manly left-wing” (83) sensibilities rubbed off on Alex, and he decided to dedicate his life to helping the poor and downtrodden.

Next, Alex discusses a boy from his neighborhood named Arnold Mandel. After his father’s death, Mandel was able to do as he pleased. He had a reputation for engaging in lurid, sexual games with other boys their age. Years later, Alex met Mandel in the street and noted that he grew up into a mature family man, a far cry from the wild boy of their youth. During their conversation, Mandel gossiped about his old sexual partners and friends, and Alex was shocked to learn about the “middle-class success” (85) of his childhood friends. The encounter made him remember his first sexual encounter, when he, Mandel, and another friend visited the house of an Italian girl named Bubbles. Bubbles performed manual stimulation on Alex, and when he ejaculated, he got semen on the couch and in his eye. While Alex was in pain and convinced he might go blind, Bubbles called him antisemitic slurs. He worried about how he would explain his blindness to his parents. The next day, Mandel bragged that Bubbles gave him oral sex and they had intercourse. Alex regretted his missed opportunity, and his mind filled with questions.