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Philip Roth

James Ley reviews 'The Trials of Portnoy' by Patrick Mullins

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The ABR Podcast
The ABR Podcast: James Ley reviews 'The Trials of Portnoy' by Patrick Mullins | #21

In today's episode, we present James Ley’s hilarious and deeply serious review of The Trials of Portnoy by Patrick Mullins. James channels the memorable prose of Philip Roth himself. Mullins’s book chronicles the legal spat that surrounded Penguin's attempt to publish Portnoy's Complaint, Roth's controversial novel that was considered lewd and offensive by Australia's censuring authorities. 

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The Trials of Portnoy: How Penguin brought down Australia’s censorship system by Patrick Mullins

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June–July 2020, no. 422
James Ley reviews 'The Trials of Portnoy: How Penguin brought down Australia’s censorship system' by Patrick Mullins

Okay, I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this country. For a start, we have this profoundly stupid and deeply irritating myth that we’re all irreverent freedom-loving larrikins and easygoing egalitarians, when it is painfully obvious that we have long been a nation of prudes and wowsers, that our collective psyche has been warped by what Patrick Mullins describes, with his characteristic lucidity, as ‘a fear of contaminating international influences’, and that we are not just an insular, conservative, and deeply conformist society, but for some unaccountable reason we take pride in our ignorance and parochialism. And let’s not neglect the fact that we are cringingly deferential and enamoured of hierarchy. Oh yes, it’s all master–slave dialectics and daddy issues around here. Why the hell else would we keep electing entitled, smirking, condescending autocrats?

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News from the Editor's Desk - August 2017

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August 2017, no. 393

Jolley Prize, Fay Zwicky (1933-2017), Miles Franklin Award shortlist, Porter Prize, Conversational Calibre, Memoirs of historians, Philip Roth ...

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Promiscuous: Portnoy’s Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness by by Bernard Avishai

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December 2012–January 2013, no. 347
Shannon Burns reviews 'Promiscuous: Portnoy’s Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness' by Bernard Avishai

I nitially banned in Australia, Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) is Philip Roth’s early, bestselling, satirical tour de force. Alexander Portnoy addresses a long monologue to his analyst, Dr Spielvogel. Among other things, the monologue tackles Portnoy’s erotic and ethical shortcomings, lingering in particular over his father’s familial and economic emasculation, his mother’s overbearing cleanliness and affection, his fraught relationship to Jewishness, and a selection of doomed love interests. Portnoy’s Complaint is by turns comedic, tragic, confronting, illuminating, anguished, and jubilant.

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Nemesis by Philip Roth

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November 2010, no. 326

With book thirty-one arriving as its author approaches his seventy-eighth birthday, the numbers are stacking up for Philip Roth ...

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J.M. Coetzee and Philip Roth on Screen

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June 2009, no. 312
'J.M. Coetzee and Philip Roth on Screen' by Brian McFarlane

‘It wasn’t like that in the book’ is one of the commonest and most irritating responses to film versions of famous novels. Adaptation of literature to film seems to be a topic of enduring interest at every level, from foyer gossip to the most learned exegesis. Sometimes, it must be said, the former is the more entertaining, but this is no place for such frivolity.

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I am that kind of person

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March 2009, no. 309

In The Ghost Writer (1979), the first of the nine Philip Roth novels in which Nathan Zuckerman plays a major role, the young Zuckerman uses a family squabble over an inheritance as the basis for a short story. His father is appalled. Why would Nathan depict his own family in such an unflattering light, perpetuate negative Jewish stereotypes, and give ammunition to anti-Semites? ‘You are not somebody who writes this kind of story and then pretends it’s the truth,’ his father despairs. ‘But I did write it,’ Nathan replies. ‘I am the kind of person who writes this kind of story.’

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