Philip Roth says that his most famous novel is dated, but like the fallacy of authorial intent we should be sceptical of that reading

Philip Roth’s revisitation of Portnoy’s Complaint, his most famous novel, in an essay in the New York Times this week is delicious and poignant and to be taken with a pinch. In what reads like the final, freeing stage of his retirement, Roth drives a stake through the heart of the book’s eponymous hero, yet again explaining his intent when he wrote it and then promptly dismantling its relevance. “Alexander Portnoy, RIP”, he writes.

Well, not RIP to the rest of us, for whom the mythology around Portnoy continues to beguile. Roth talked about the novel in last year’s PBS documentary, telling the story of how, just before it was published, he warned his parents it was likely to cause trouble, at which his mother burst loudly into tears. “He has delusions of grandeur,” she said.

As it turned out, the author’s delusions weren’t big enough. The success and longevity of Portnoy’s Complaint exceeded even Roth’s grandiose expectations, so that, he wrote in the Times, he had no idea in 1969 that, “I was on the brink of swapping my identity for his.”

There is some gruffness in this statement, as there would be from a novelist of Roth’s stature who, after writing 31 books, is still hoisted on the reputation of his fourth. That 45 years later he is still having to debunk misconceptions about Portnoy is a mark both of the novel’s reach and the way fiction is read. And so he slogs through the usual idiocies: that it was cathartic in anything but the literary sense. That he wrote it as a substitute for therapy. That he was getting back at his parents. The only thing he was trying to get away from, he writes, was “a habitual sense of prose decorum”.

Demureness doesn’t suit Roth, a point he makes in the piece – the novel is a rebuke to literary niceties, of content and form – and then promptly contradicts himself by making the faux-modest claim that we should let Portnoy go because, like Updike’s Couples, it is hopelessly dated. Oh, please.

He’s not wrong about Couples, with its onerous naughtiness and 1960s wife-swapping scene. But Portnoy isn’t in the same category and I suspect Roth knows it. It can’t date, because it never subscribed to any particular fashion. As Roth himself writes, it is a novel driven not so much by social mores as by timeless impulses, much like the Iliad (delusions of grandeur!). “That is how the whole of European literature begins: singing the virile rage of Achilles.” Portnoy’s Complaint doesn’t date because EL James wrote Fifty Shades of Grey.

With a flicker of the old rage, Roth explains, “One writes a repellent book … not to be repellent but to represent the repellent, to air the repellent, to expose it, to reveal how it looks and what it is.” Must we go through this again? We must. “Chekhov wisely advised that the writer’s task lies not in solving problems but in properly presenting the problem.”

I don’t care what the author says. Portnoy still stands.