Portnoy's Complaint is a novel by Phil Roth. He has an excellent reputation for works of literary merit.
Roth was one of the most honored American writers of his generation.
[6] He received the
National Book Critics Circle award for
The Counterlife, the
PEN/Faulkner Award for
Operation Shylock,
The Human Stain, and
Everyman, a second National Book Award for
Sabbath's Theater, and the
Pulitzer Prize for
American Pastoral. In 2001, Roth received the inaugural
Franz Kafka Prize in
Prague. In 2005, the
Library of America began publishing his complete works, making him the second author so anthologized while still living, after
Eudora Welty.
[7] Harold Bloom named him one of the four greatest American novelists of his day, along with
Cormac McCarthy,
Thomas Pynchon, and
Don DeLillo.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
He's worth trying if you've never read him.
He grew up in what was a Jewish neighborhood in Newark, NJ, less than a mile from where I lived in Hillside. I recognize many of the places he writes about.