Books: Portnoy's Complaint, by Philip Roth

Today, we practice using em dashes correctly. I have been using them incorrectly for many years now. It's infuriating.

When every book you read reminds you of a different old lover, you begin to feel old. Not old because one must be old to have had so many lovers, but because of the concomitant emotions the reading inspires. A tender, almost Proustian, nostalgia comes in waves—poignant—fragile—and the time elapsed since said affair—usually a month or two, sometimes maybe a year or two—and the time elapsed during said affair—so often barely an actual affair and instead a string of semi-isolated incidents, meaningless at the time, to one party or sometimes even both—in retrospection, both durations take on proportions—emotive and temporal—that they never had in real time.

The non-affair—the ill-strung strand of isolated incidents, as it were—whose memory this book welled up in me—was one that ended badly. It was one that progressed badly, too, but was marked by a few shimmering highlights—the warm shock of our first coupling, a bottle of my favorite bourbon on my birthday, a sweaty evening when a thunderstorm blinked my walls blue, and the inconstant but lovely parade of sweets—financiers, eclairs, palmiers, blackout cookies (no croquembouche for the two of us, alas)—left on my desk after lunch while he was courting. I will leave out the bad parts. Who wants to remember them?

The problem is that reading this book, I couldn't help but remember them all. He (the lover), being a hyper-intellectual Jew, mid-30s, a victim of arrested emotional development, whose sexual appetite was dark and wide, leaped from lover to lover, mirroring completely our narrator, Alexander Portnoy, also hyper-intellectual, also Jewish, also mid-30s, as he philanders his way across America, obsessed with goyische cunt. My lover aside, the book is incredibly well written and filled with stunning passages on the joys of female anatomy, the horrors of Jewish mothers, and the dangerous places in which the two intersect. Told in confessional flashbacks, from the analyst's couch, the chronology slips as easily in and out of childhood as. . . well, you know.

Like the affair, the book ended badly (though without any cursing; one has lower expectations for books than lovers, which, upon consideration, might be completely backward), although it didn't progress badly at all. It just sort of, well, stopped. I'll admit that I was disappointed when it finished before I did. I mean, before I wanted it to. I mean, ahem, yes. I suppose that is the primary pitfall of writing a novel without a narrative trajectory. To be completely satisfying—all-encompassing—art must stop when in reality, life goes on.