Whose penchant for french fries troubled Mrs. I laughed at some things, some I don't want to remember.' (Mel Weiner was a character The book opened up a lot of things for me. 'I appear in 'Portnoy's Complaint' in several places,' he confided. 'It was almost as if I could sit back and listen to a patient.' Swerdlow said of the Portnoy book, which is written in the form of a monologue addressed to a psychiatrist. 'It was very comfortable for me to read,' Dr. Bernard Swerdlow, another close friend who became a psychiatrist, said the author 'uncovered the real feelings of the people and the time, the kind of guilt and destructive symptoms of the environment.' Weich cautioned, 'if you took everything very literally in the last book.'ĭr.

Weich remarked as he sat back in a black-leather chair beside his analyst's couch. 'He conjures up certain universal experiences for people,' Dr. Roth since high school, suggested that the author possessed a gift for taking fragments of several people and fashioning them into a single fictional Martin Weich, a Manhattan psychiatrist who has maintained his friendship with Mr. 'We read Salinger's 'Catcher in the Rye' and loved it,' he added. One summer was a complete Thomas Wolfe binge, when we read everything he wrote and imagined ourselves real romantics.' 'Our first real awareness of literature came from Phil. 'He was the conversational catalyst of our group,' the dentist said. I think the book is tremendously incisive. 'All this stuck in one cubicle of his brain. 'Phil always had an observing eye for everything around him,' Dr. Roth as an extremely bright, lusty, fun-loving friend who viewed life with the caustic humor that characterizes Alexander Portnoy. Robert Heyman, then a classmate and now a dentist, recalled Mr. Readers of the intensely personal novel have speculated at length about how much fact might be fused with fiction, despite the author's desire that it be treated as a work of fiction and not as an event or social document.ĭr. With humor and obscenity, the novel portrays the emotions and escapades of Alexander Portnoy, the guilt-laden protagonist who grows up in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood of Newark.īesides identifying Weequahic High School by name, the novel specifies such sites as the Empire Burlesque, the Weequahic Diner, the Newark Museum and Irvington Park, all local landmarks that helped shape the youth of the real Roth and the fictional Portnoy,īoth graduates of Weequahic class of '50. It has provided the focus for the fiction of Philip Roth, the novelist who evokes his era at Weequahic High School in the highly acclaimed 'Portnoy's Complaint.' LUBASCH 36-year-old high school in a deteriorating section of Newark has suddenly found an unexpected place in contemporary American literature, delighting FebruPhilip Roth Shakes Weequahic High By ARNOLD H.

Portnoy's complaint