Steven J. Zipperstein at Literary Hub:
Already in 1967, the same year When She Was Good came out, the first samples of Portnoy’s Complaint were issued in wide-circulation magazines like Esquire and Sport, as well as the highbrow Partisan Review. Indeed, it was there, in that mainstay of the New York intelligentsia, that Roth signaled his departure from the magazine’s austere norms with the chapter entitled “Whacking Off.” Solotaroff’s new paperback journal New American Review ran two excerpted chapters of the novel, the first almost two years before the book’s appearance, the second numbering no fewer than twenty-eight thousand words.
By the time it was published in January 1969, Portnoy’s Complaint was tipped as a phenomenal bestseller. The Washington Post predicted that, for a long time to come, “we will judge our friends by what they say” about Portnoy. Quoting lines from the novel, the Houston Chronicle said—barely a week after its appearance—had already become “a national sport.” Few if any matched Albert Goldman’s excitement, writing in Life: “A savior and scapegoat of the ’60s,” declared Goldman, “Portnoy is destined at the Christological age of 33 to take upon himself all the sins of the sexually obsessed modern man and expiate them in a tragicomic crucifixion.”
More here.
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