入選美國當代圖書館20世紀百大小說
1923-2005年時代雜誌百大最佳小說
一位猶太男子羞恥卻又狂放的自我告白
醫生，我這是什麼病呢？這就是我從前老是聽到的猶太人的苦難嗎？這就是從大屠殺和大迫害一直傳承到我身上的枷鎖嗎？它源自這美好的兩千年以來，非猶太人贈與我們的嘲弄和侮辱嗎？哦，我的秘密，我的恥辱，我的心悸，我的臉紅，我的汗水！我對單純人生裡世事變遷的反應方式！醫生，我再也無法忍受這種無端的恐嚇了！賜給我男子氣概吧！讓我勇敢起來！讓我堅強！讓我完整！我受夠當個優秀的猶太男孩，一會兒在人前討好我的父母、讓他們高興，一會兒卻在背地裡抽動著！我受夠了！
波特諾伊滔滔不絕地向他的精神科醫師獨白自己的家庭背景。他憶起從小到大所面臨的困境，父親望子成龍的期待、母親的溺愛……極端的性慾讓他透過各種「創意」的方法尋求釋放，卻帶給他極大的羞恥感，並且對自我價值及身為猶太人的荒謬命運感到困窘。
【波特諾伊的怨訴】一種身心失調病症，病症為心中強烈道德感和利他衝動，與極端的性渴望交戰，患者通常為性格乖僻者。心理學者相信許多癥候皆可追溯自由母子關係中建立起來的聯繫。然而，在真正的性滿足中既無幻想亦無行為問題，只出現壓倒性的羞恥感，以及特別對以去勢形式表現出來的懲罰感到懼怕。
狂放的文筆寫出潛意識裡最深的焦慮
2011曼布克獎、諾貝爾文學獎熱門得主聲名大噪之作
「至今描寫關於性的書中最驚世駭俗而逗趣的一部」
──Guardian衛報
「羅斯是美國文壇上最勇敢的作家。有道德勇氣，處理政治議題上也很勇敢。而『波特諾伊』呈現了這部分的英勇無懼。」
──辛西亞‧奧茲克(Cynthia Ozick), Newsday新聞日報
「令人愉快地逗趣…荒誕又生氣勃勃、瘋狂又喧鬧…鮮明栩栩如生的閱讀經驗」
──New York Times Book Review紐約時報書評
「就是……最逗趣的美國小說中的一部」
──Chicago Sun-Times芝加哥太陽報
「感人同時又好笑得令人噴飯的好色…羅斯具有活力充沛天分…像是了不起的模擬者和幻想者，已經在人類歷史中被最有語言能力的群體製造出來。」
──阿爾弗雷德‧卡辛(Alfred Kazin), New York Review of Books紐約書評
「艾歷山大˙波特諾伊是個極出色的喜劇角色。他將會影響許多讀者，就像他母親對他的那樣──是『畢生最難忘的人物』。」
──New Statement

Against the backdrop of the Korean War, a young man faces life's unimagined chances and terrifying consequences. It is 1951 in America, the second year of the Korean War. A studious, law-abiding, intense youngster from Newark, New Jersey, Marcus Messner, is beginning his sophomore year on the pastoral, conservative campus of Ohio's Winesburg College. And why is he there and not at the local college in Newark where he originally enrolled? Because his father, the sturdy, hard-working neighborhood butcher, seems to have gone mad -- mad with fear and apprehension of the dangers of adult life, the dangers of the world, the dangers he sees in every corner for his beloved boy. As the long-suffering, desperately harassed mother tells her son, the father's fear arises from love and pride. Perhaps, but it produces too much anger in Marcus for him to endure living with his parents any longer. He leaves them and, far from Newark, in the midwestern college, has to find his way amid the customs and constrictions of another American world. Indignation, Philip Roth's twenty-ninth book, is a story of inexperience, foolishness, intellectual resistance, sexual discovery, courage, and error. It is a story told with all the inventive energy and wit Roth has at his command, at once a startling departure from the haunted narratives of old age and experience in his recent books and a powerful addition to his investigations of the impact of American history on the life of the vulnerable individual.

Patrimony , a true story, touches the emotions as strongly as anything Philip Roth has ever written. Roth watches as his eighty-six-year-old father—famous for his vigor, charm, and his repertoire of Newark recollections—battles with the brain tumor that will kill him. The son, full of love, anxiety, and dread, accompanies his father through each fearful stage of his final ordeal, and, as he does so, discloses the survivalist tenacity that has distinguished his father's long, stubborn engagement with life.

As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth's protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father's glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede's beautiful American luck deserts him.
For Swede's adored daughter, Merry, has grown from a loving, quick-witted girl into a sullen, fanatical teenager—a teenager capable of an outlandishly savage act of political terrorism. And overnight Swede is wrenched out of the longer-for American pastoral and into the indigenous American berserk. Compulsively readable, propelled by sorrow, rage, and a deep compassion for its characters, this is Roth's masterpiece.