Promiscuous: Portnoy’s Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness by Bernard Avishai (review)

In Promiscuous, Bernard Avishai casts himself as both Philip Roth’s and Alexander Portnoy’s “sidekicker,” to borrow a phrase from the title character’s Croat paramour in Roth’s 1995 novel, Sabbath’s Theater (9). Avishai also introduces himself as the voice of his (and my) generation, which came of age just as Portnoy’s Complaint (1969)—Roth’s third novel—spurted countless seeds of controversy into America’s cultural conversation. Avishai views Portnoy as American literature’s Woodstock (31) and, like Woodstock, as a “deeply uncynical” expression of love (196); as the climax of a liberation movement (209); as a generation’s defining moment, and as a milestone of “cultural insurgency” (14). This perennially popular succès de scandale, Avishai argues, continues to confront us with its “unfinished business”(21). Or perhaps since Roth wrote a novel instead of renting a farm, Goethe’s widely and “avidly read” The Sorrows of Young Werther (Coetzee) might make for a more apt comparison. This 1770 novel also “shaped its time” and became a universal “compass point,” a claim Avishai repeatedly makes for Portnoy (42, 68). Goethe’s hero became “representative of [his] generation,” the pathetic face of European Romanticism’s Sturm und Drang movement (Coetzee), which Avishai calls to mind in describing Portnoy as an exploration of “the Drang before the Sturm” (11).

Surprisingly from a scholar of “political economy” (20), Avishai is given to axiomatic superlatives, like his declaration of Portnoy’s “iconic status” as “the sixties most iconoclastic work” (14). Notwithstanding Avishai’s intellectual brio, this tone sometimes confounds questions about whether Avishai is arguing for a view of Portnoy as exceptional or as representative. This confusion mirrors Avishai’s ambivalence over whether to cast himself as Portnoy’s critic or as Roth’s confidante. He tantalizes readers with references to the “banter” and “counsel” he and Roth shared, but turns miserly about reporting these exchanges. For example, Avishai quotes generously from the 1999 Bard College teaching notes Roth furnished him (8–9, 14–17, 73, 80–81), but when recalling how Roth “once told me he found the end of Portnoy “its weakest part” (141), Avishai only paraphrases. Since this observation leads to an account of a lunch Avishai arranged between Roth and the former Likkud prime minister, Ehud Olmert, in which Olmert accused Roth of representing the “inauthentic” American Jew, it was frustrating to hear what Olmert actually said but to learn only, via paraphrase, what Roth talked about.

When Avishai does quote Roth directly, his accuracy becomes questionable—as in his recollection that Roth told him, “I was born the month [FDR] was elected” (156). Surely Roth would have said “inaugurated” (in March 1933) not “elected” (in November 1932). Likewise, Avishai ought to know that in I Married a Communist (1998), Murray Ringold is not the narrator’s “uncle” (210).

The scholarly limitations of Promiscuous extend beyond these venial slips. Sometimes Avishai seems unaware that his insights have become commonplaces rather than news. Examples include his account of Roth’s insurrectional ribaldry (63), his moves to push—and ultimately to tear—Joyce’s sexualcandor envelope (5, 40; Bloom 68–71) and Avishai’s epiphany (“Alas”!) about how Roth deflates the imperious “reductionist” claims for the explanatory supremacy of social science, particularly psychoanalysis (16, 190–93, 205–206; Bloom 106). Avishai needlessly refights battles with long-dead and discredited Portnoy-bashers, which he admits were “won a generation ago” (146), citing for example the canard that readers rejected decades ago—thanks largely to Roth’s own efforts—the anti-aesthetic insistence “confusing Roth with Portnoy” (53).

More appealingly, this insouciance about ongoing critical conversations frees Avishai to play the tour guide, the flañeur or “roving soul” (Arcades) traversing a vast cultural landscape, where Alfred Kazin and Elia Kazan, Baudelaire and Eliot Spitzer, turn up on the very same page (31, 64). In an irresistible tour de force, Avishai turns edgy D.H. Lawrence’s...