Portnoy's Complaint combines fact and fiction to expose occurrences of everyday life in great detail. A brilliant exploitation of the new freedom in language as the voice of the 1960s, the novel is a lively, articulate, often hilariously funny American bildungsroman; a confessional and self-explanatory monologue; an obscene book but not pornographic; a satirical farce but not ironic; an intelligent mixture of black comedy and pathos; a harsh view of middleclass experience combined with a rebellion toward freedom expressed sexually by a young man.