Roth's Portnoy reconsidered: a masterpiece of Jewish angst or a Shandeh?

Promiscuous: Portnoy's Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness, by Bernard Avishai. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2012. 230 pages.

Philip Roth's recent announcement that he is done with writing may be good news for sales of Promiscuous: Portnoy's Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness, Bernard Avishai's fascinating, impassioned reconsideration of Portnoy's Complaint. Not that Avishai's efforts require such a boost: the book is swift and muscular, entertaining and enlightening, even if its political analysis is not always on target.

Why did Avishai decide to write a book about Portnoy's Complaint? He notes that the novel had a huge impact on his generation, yet many have only a vague recollection of its plot or any of the novel's "big ideas." As a cousin of Avishai's wrote him, "I don't remember much except that Portnoy was funny and bad and vigorous, and that seemed a comfort." [6] To Avishai, the time seemed right to elucidate the novel's contributions--why it mattered--as "the clock is ticking on Roth," and on Roth's audience. Avishai and Roth have been friends for years, and he interviewed Roth extensively for the book.

Promiscuous performs the salutary task of reminding us that once upon a time books had an influence on public debates and private lives to a degree that they seldom do in a cultural commons now fractured by a multitude of new platforms delivering WTMI (way too much information) to a public divided into ever finer demographic niches. Published in a time that to many of us seems so distant--1969! The first man on the moon! The Mets first World Series! Bell bottoms!--Avishai reconstructs the historical moment of the novel's birth, which helps explain the loud noise it made when it came out.

Avishai argues persuasively that the book was shocking not just because masturbation, a heretofore forbidden subject in American literature, was a major plot device. Rather, the whole carefully constructed, crazily careening vehicle--Portnoy's masturbation, his fixation on bedding non-Jewish women, his tortured relationship with his parents--represented a "falling away of restraint," an all-out assault on bourgeois propriety. Astutely, Avishai contends that the novel was not so much a valorization of 1960s' morality, but a repudiation of the moral strictures of the 1940s and 50s. (Critics have pointed out something similar about the movie "The Graduate.") Somewhat contradictorily, Avishai maintains that Portnoy's Complaint also transcends its particular historical moment because its themes were "latent in any bourgeois decade."

Portnoy's Complaint famously outraged mainstream American Jews, those Eastern European immigrants and their children who worked so hard to claw their way into the middle class. Yet despite--and because--of its irreverence and smuttiness, not to mention its humor, Jews bought and read Portnoy's Complaint. (A joke seems appropriate here. The scene: two little old ladies sitting at a table in a restaurant. Minnie: "The food here is pure poison." Hannah: "Yeah, and such small portions.") Coming as it did after the Holocaust and American Jews' hard-won rise to respectability, Roth's work seemed to be a thumb in the eye of all those for whom respectability was a serious matter. In particular, the cadre of Jewish intellectuals who would later be called neoconservatives were appalled, complaining that Portnoy's Complaint gave antisemites new ammtmition just when the Holocaust had made hating Jews unseemly and Israel's victory in the 1967 war had undermined the stereotype of Jews as weak. Of course, it was the children of these first- and second-generation immigrants, at least those questioning the situation into which they had been born, who found the work profoundly liberating--men more than women, one suspects; Avishai does not seriously explore gendered responses to the work.

Attacks also came from the left, none of more consequence than that of critic Irving Howe. Howe regarded Portnoy's attitude toward his parents as an unconscionable desire to shake himself free of the burdens of being a Jew in order to be recognized simply as a human being. For Howe, Portnoy's ingratitude and self-indulgence in the face of the claims of history on 20th century Jews bordered on the obscene. Howe's critique stung. Avishai brilliantly analyzes Howe's inability to understand the novel. For example, Howe could not grasp that Portnoy's rhetorical attacks on his parents gain no traction as satire if Portnoy does not love his mother and respect his father. Like most critics, according to Avishai, Howe failed to see how Portnoy's Complaint is actually "an extremely loving book." [196]

Avishai also argues convincingly that Howe could not fitly appreciate the novel because he was limited by the conventional political lens through which he analyzed the book. Howe knew working class hardship firsthand, and his own ascent into the professional class had its personal cost. Despite, or because of this, he retained a hard-headed political pragmatism throughout his life that left little sympathy for the novel's more subtle project. Portnoy's Complaint, Avishai states, had no political goal. Or, as he also argues, by 1969, "Turning inward, to a kind of sexual defiance, seemed political all by itself, maybe the only politics left to us."

Perhaps, but that seems to me an unduly narrow view of the sexual politics of the time. Rather than looking inward, the gay rights movement and feminism were making bold political claims around sexuality. It is also not clear why Avishai thinks that sexual politics were the only kind of politics for him and the unspecified "us" in the quote above.

For that matter, Avishai overstates the consensus on bourgeois respectability among American Jews. For all the preoccupation with fitting into middle class life, the 1960s also gave us such Jewish countercultural figures as Lenny Bruce, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Bob Dylan, and a whole tribe of Jewish hippies and anti-war activists. Yet it is true, as Avishai shows, that Portnoy's Complaint only makes sense against a background of middie class prosperity and respectability--which, of course, is not lost on Portnoy, whose knowledge of this only stokes the fires of ingratitude and guilt in which he broils himself.

Avishai takes the big risk of asserting that the novel's profound political contribution is that it is a culmination of 1960s liberalism. If the civil rights movement was right that individuals should be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin or their membership in a group that they did or did not ask to join, then Portnoy Complaint showed that we were in for a bumpy ride: character is determined by so many factors, "ethical explorations are inherently individual, subjective, limited by the senses, by lust, by interested experience, by vanity and trauma, time and place." As Avishai puts it, the novel "undermined our famous belief in happiness." Yet, the novel also "valorized what's proven to be liberalism's largest, most precious moral claim, that precisely because all perception is absolute, the principle of tolerance must be absolute." [210]

This is intriguing, if not altogether convincing, as liberalism also recognized the role of the past, and racial and ethnic oppression, in shaping individual lives. The Civil Rights Act and affirmative action policies are enduring, if besieged, legacies of the high tide of 1960s liberalism. I think rather that Portnoy's Complaint underlined the tension between the claims of the past, especially those made on us by virtue of membership in a group, and our own desires as individuals. The collective and the individual, obligation and freedom: Roth did not discover these fateful Siamese twins, but his attempt to separate them--with, as Avishai shows, both a scalpel and a meat cleaver--is certainly one source of the novel's fascination.

Avishai also does an able job in excavating the Freudian armature of the novel, exposing how Roth satirizes it. As Roth himself points out, the psychoanalytic encounter presented a frame within which Portnoy's rantings could take place: it is a space in which such expansive ruminations (or rantings, if you prefer) are licensed. Ironically, Avishai makes the case (persuasive, I think) that the orthodox Freudian family drama in Portnoy's Complaint is inspired by the Jewish family stereotype that Roth's own psychiatrist, like other emigre German Jewish psychiatrists of the time, held. What is less evident, and more interesting, is Avishai's contention that Pormoy in fact does want the world that the Freudian cure presupposes is appropriate and healthy. The problem, of course, is that that is not all that Portnoy wants and wants and WANTS! and this makes it impossible for him to be happy in the conventional sense alluded to in the subtitle of Prom/scuous.

Now that I have opened the can of worms that is the penchant for readers to see Roth in his or her creations, I should state that Avishai is very careful in using evidence from Roth's interviews, other novels, and non-fiction, distinguishing clearly between the author and his fictions. He rightly takes to task those who confuse Roth with Portnoy, dealing handily with this thankless job of conceptual brush-clearing that nonetheless has to be done when discussing Roth's work. In this regard, he approvingly cites James Wood that Roth is

   the great stealth posunodemist of American letters ... because he
   does not regard himself as a postmodernist. He is intensely
   interested in fabrication, in the performance of self, in the
   reality we make up in order to live; but his fiction examines this
   "without sacrificing the factuality of time and place to surreal
   fakery or magic-realist gimmickry," as Zuckerman approvingly says
   of Lonoff's work. [208]

In this brief book, Avishai manages to achieve his aim of bringing Portnoy's Complaint back into sharp focus, showing us why it was important at the time it was published, and what relevance it possibly may have today. True, I am skeptical of some of his claims, especially regarding the politics surrounding Portnoy's Complaint. Yet Avishai's close, enthusiastic, and incisive reading of the novel and its times yields a wealth of insights--the tension between collective claims and individual freedoms (especially fraught for Jews) the performance of self, the use of satire (on which Avishai has much to say that I cannot share here due to space limitations)--into aspects of Roth's work that continue to be fruitful in American literature.

JOEL STREICKER is a critic and translator living in San Francisco. His reviews have appeared in Midstream, The Forward, Shofar, and other publications, and his translations of Latin American literature have been published in Words Without Borders, Two Lines, The Bitter Oleander, and other magazines.

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Title Annotation:	"Promiscuous: Portnoy's Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness" by Bernard Avishai
Author:	Streicker, Joel
Publication:	Midstream
Article Type:	Book review
Date:	Jan 1, 2013
Words:	1739
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