Promiscuous: Portnoy’s Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness

The early 2000s saw the publication of a number of books that portrayed the art of reading as a how-to guide for leading a better life. Most of these books took a panoramic approach, focusing either on the lessons gleaned from devouring the entire oeuvre of a prolific artist, such as Proust, or, even more generally, the romance of a life lived in and through reading. The second decade of the twenty-first century, however, belongs to portraits of reading in miniature. Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch (2014) focuses on George Eliot’s novel as a microcosm for her own experiences coming of age in England, while Samantha Ellis offers a retrospective glance at her own (literary) heroine worship in How to Be a Heroine (2015). Bernard Avishai’s Promiscuous: Portnoy’s Complaint and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness joins this illustrious company, using Roth’s profane, rollicking late-’60s novel as a springboard for...