A review by michael5000
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth

2.0

Portnoy's Complaint has not, it seems to me, aged well.  It also seemed to me not to have aged well when I read it in high school, in perhaps 1985, and I think I was right although I didn't really know why I was right at the time.  In 1985, the swingin' phase of the sexual revolution and the heyday of Freudian psychoanalysis, although really only a decade and change in the past, felt like a foreign country.  Today, what seemed at the time like naughty but virile sexual braggadocio is generally recognized as abusive behavior, and so not really very funny.

Why is it still on lists?  Well, it is well crafted and well-paced, with a narrator who is at once unreliable and all too reliable.  But I bet it's on its way out.