One writes a repellent book (and “Portnoy’s Complaint” was taken by many to be solely that) not to be repellent but to represent the repellent, to air the repellent, to expose it, to reveal how it looks and what it is. Who isn’t? Look at Robert Fagles’s translation of “The Iliad.” What’s the first word? “Rage.” That is how the whole of European literature begins: singing the virile rage of Achilles. Portnoy is as rich with ire as with lust. Here we get to overhear Portnoy at the analytic patient’s extemporizing task of managing (or mismanaging) his disorder. In short, I wrote about the quotient of the unsocialized that is rooted in almost everyone and addressed by each with varying degrees of success. I portrayed a man who is the repository of every unacceptable thought, a 33-year-old man possessed by dangerous sensations, nasty opinions, savage grievances, sinister feelings and, of course, one stalked by the implacable presence of lust. Impatient with the virtues of logical progression, I wanted to renounce the orderly, coherent development of an imagined world and to advance helter-skelter, in a frenzy, as the classic analytic patient ideally proceeds in the throes of associative freedom. While the protagonist may be straining to escape his moral conscience, I was attempting to break free from a literary conscience that had been constructed by my reading, my schooling and my fastidiousness - from a habitual sense of prose decorum. I was looking not for my catharsis as a neurotic or as a son, as some suggested, but rather for emancipation from traditional approaches to storytelling. In writing it, I wasn’t looking for my freedom from anything other than the writer I had started out to be in my first three books. “Portnoy’s Complaint” was the fourth of 31 books.

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