Philip Roth Opens Up About 'Portnoy's Complaint'

It's the book that made him not just famous but notorious, and one he rarely discusses publicly. 'Portnoy's Complaint,' Philip Roth's third novel, is the subject of this segment of TheDailyBeast.com's Web series, 'The Beast Bar.'

Roth tells Tina Brown that the novel "was a big marker... I dont have any regrets about writing it or publishing it."

Category:

News & Politics

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• philip roth
• tina brown
• the humbling
• the beast bar
• the daily beast
• Portnoy's Complaint
• literature
• books

[uncoolbeans]

she probably meant greatest living american author

[queenban]

@wanchope6700

cont... instead an archaic and almost prophetic translation of the natural world into his books, where flora and fauna co-exists disastrously with man in the spiralling whirligig of his death-worlds.

[dublo7]

Philip Roth seems like a really lovely man.

[queenban]

@CastleRockFan Thank you, kind sir.

[pawsoned]

The greatest American novelist my eye.

[CastleRockFan]

@queenban "Spiraling whirligig of his death-worlds."

Nice, my friend.

[madamerotten]

Please post your comments after you use a spell checker. I am getting very upset with all of you. There's no excuse for all these misspelled words. Don't argue with me, just use a spell checker. Also, use correct punctuation and capitalize words appropriately. I don't want any arguments.

[jimmyjanglin]

shes probably going by the "board's" list of "100 best novels" where portnoy's complaint ranks as no.52. and at no.52 roth is the highest ranked author still living.

[queenban]

@wanchope6700

I agree with what you're saying, especially with regard to the 'transaction' between reader and writer. But in terms of prose style and poetic expression the only American writer of the last fifty years that compares to McCarthy is John Updike and even he is a distant second. As Stanley Booth wrote about his novels, "They are so good that one can hardly say how good they really are." Where Roth has, as you say, a 'fastidious attention to psychoanalytic detail," McCarthy has

[wanchope6700]

I disagree, Roth IS America's greatest living writer, at least of literary fiction. He has pushed the frontiers of the novel a great deal and examined the transaction that takes place between reader and writer more thoroughly (and interestingly than almost anyone else). The Zuckerman books alone would qualify him as the best, if only for their fastidious attention to psychoanalytic detail.