Philip Roth’s Alex Portnoy is the satirist par excellence. He’s awfully clever, making us laugh out loud. But who is Portnoy mocking exactly? The bourgeois family? Psychoanalysis? Himself? Bernard Avishai, author of Promiscuous: ‘Portnoy’s Complaint’ and Our Doomed Pursuit of Happiness, talks to Roth himself to come up with the real object of Portnoy’s critique of America.
