So great is the fame of the book even before its publication that it is being hailed as the book of the present decade and as an American masterwork in the tradition of Huckleberry Finn. The gospel that records the passion of this mock messiah is a slender, psychotic novel by Philip Roth called Portnoy’s Complaint (the title is a triple pun signifying that the hero is a whiner, a lover and a sick man). A savior and scapegoat of the ’60s, Portnoy is destined at the Christological age of 33 to take upon himself all the sins of sexually obsessed modern man and expiate them in a tragicomic crucifixion. Gathered at an old New York City inn called Random House, at the stroke of midnight on the 21st of February in this 5,729th years since the creation of the world, they will hail the birth of a new American hero, Alexander Portnoy. But this year a real literary-cultural event portends and every shepherd of public opinion, every magus of criticism, is wending his way toward its site.
Most of our classics, when they first appeared, met with disappointing receptions, and even the much-ballyhoed best-sellers of recent years have rarely cut a great swath outside the lanes of publicity and journalism. The publication of a book is not often a major event in American culture.
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