Promiscuous: Portnoy's Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness BernardAvishai. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.

Abstract

Promiscuous: Portnoy's Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness Bernard Avishai. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.Teaching Portnoy's Complaint (1969) to Israeli students had made this reviewer approach Bernard Avishai's intriguingly titled book with curiosity. For Roth's novel remains, as this reviewer found out, as explosive as ever, its promiscuous nature accounting only partly for its shock value for first time readers. Promiscuous takes on Roth's most (in)famous novel, attempting to explain the reasons behind its enduring appeal more than forty years after it first erupted on the literary scene. It aims to show how the book has helped shape the American imagination about Jewishness, masculinity, psychoanalysis, and the nature of fiction. It an ambitious task which Avishai, Roth's longtime friend, responds to with fervor and love. This the strength of this meditation on Roth's most influential text, but it may also account for some of the book's less nuanced moments.Promiscuous traces Portnoy's trajectory and reveals the ways Roth's fiction both rooted in material realities of American life in the late 1960s while also offering an imaginative way of exploring these realities' innovative fictional form. Avishai thus structures his book around the main issues Roth's novel addresses: the novel's form as a confession, Portnoy's role as a satirist, Portnoy as the object of Roth's satire, rather than merely a voice for Roth's own satirical impulse, and, finally, the role psychoanalysis plays in the novel. What all these strands of investigation share the point Avisahi's book returns to again and again and appears in the heading of his first chapter, A Novel in the Form of a Confession: The Enigma of Portnoy, Who Is Not (25). To what extent Portnoy is or isn't Roth, a claim which was at the center of much of the vicious attacks on Roth's novel, becomes a focal point in Avishai's attempts to exonerate Roth from this charge.It seems Avishai very much invested in answering these charges at length. The longest chapter in the book entitled, 'The Best Kind': Portnoy as the Object of Satire (91-159), offers an extended exploration of, and answer to, Roth's attackers, most prominent among them the man who first championed the young Roth, Irving Howe. Avishai responds to Howe's attack with an impassioned plea that aims to correct Roth's own response to the charges in Reading Myself and Others (1975, expanded 1985) which Avishai claims not Roth at his best (119). …