RSS"'Portnoy, yes, it’s an old French name, a corruption of porte noire, meaning back door or gate. Apparently in the Middle Ages in France the door to our family manor house…'" Thus the young Alexander Portnoy dreams of convincing the pert shiksa ice-skater that he is not a Jew. But even in his dream she is not to be misled. "'You seem a very nice person, Mr Porte-Noir, but why do you go around covering the middle of your face like that?"' As the narrator goes on to explain, to us if not to her, it is because of his nose, which, unlike his penis, is now, with the onset of adolescence, so insistent on extending itself that it can’t be persuaded to retract even temporarily. “That ain’t a nose,” shouts his interior voice, "it’s a hose! Screw off, Jewboy! Get off the ice and leave these girls alone!"
The Jewish notables who vilified Philip Roth after the publication of Portnoy’s Complaint in 1969 were objecting to a lot more about its hero than his preoccupation with sex. They didn’t like his preoccupation with his nose, either. They didn’t like Roth’s apparent suggestion that there was no level ground for a young American male Jew between the twin peaks of tormented insecurity and priapic self-assertion. As a goy who was born and raised in Australia, where the book was banned, and who first read it in England, where it wasn’t, I couldn’t see their point at the time. I was too busy rolling around fighting for breath. It was the funniest book in the world. What was there not to like, except perhaps the hilarious sexual frankness that had caused the distinctly non-Jewish puritans of my benighted homeland to wig out? Why should his own people attack him?
With his latest book, The Plot Against America, the answer becomes clear. It was because the very idea of "his own people" was bad news to people who wanted their ethnicity to be a minor issue, not a major one. A re-reading of Portnoy’s Complaint – and there could be no more delightful occupation – reveals that the rabbinical elders who convicted its author of Judische Selbsthass, Jewish self-hatred, had quite a lot to go on. Not without reason, they were even more shaken up by what was going on in Portnoy’s mind than by what was going on in his pants. Compared with his throbbing self-consciousness as a Jew, Portnoy’s throbbing crotch was a sideshow. But Roth’s judges convicted him without trying him first. He was proud of his background: savagely proud. Along with all the other themes he has explored since, his exultant celebration of Jewish-American social cohesion is there in his first book to become world famous. The earlier books – Goodbye Columbus, Letting Go and When She Was Good – had each stated some of his future subjects, but Portnoy’s Complaint stated the whole lot, packed together and painted like a circus act. Portnoy’s Complaint is a trick car out of which, instead of a family of dwarves, novels climb one after the other, at an astonishing rate and seemingly without end. None of them is without its felicities, a round dozen of them are indispensable reading, a good handful of that dozen are among the best novels ever written in America, and all of them can be found tightly encoded into his original masterpiece. That lavish celebration of baseball in The Great American Novel, for example, is there in little, in the scenes where the grown men of Portnoy’s Arcadian neighbourhood play seven-inning softball on a Sunday spring morning while the youngsters long to be so masculine, funny and sure of their place. But this new novel was in there too: a novel wholly, instead of partly, concerned with being unsure – with insecurity.
(The rest of this article is in The Meaning of Recognition, published by Picador in 2005.)