Why It’s Impossible to Teach Portnoy’s Complaint

PiliP Ro th at 80 3. See Ivy Schweitzer, “The Story of “Hannah P.”: Recovering Portnoy’s Sister,” Shofar 31, no. 1 (2012): 70–92; as well as Marshall Bruce Gentry, “Newark Maid Feminism in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, Shofar 19, no. 1 (2000): 74–83. 4. I also often think of Crevecoeur, so often misremembered as an American mythmaker, for his most frequently anthologized excerpt “What is an American?” from Letters from an American Farmer (1782). Yet if we keep reading that novel, we learn that Crevecoeur’s fictional narrator becomes increasingly terrified and terrorized by the revolution, and finally resolves to take his family to go live among the Indians. That novel too is an account of the fiction, the lie, of the American pastoral. 5. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993), 5. 6. Clare Sigrist-Sutton, “Mistaking Merry: Tearing the Veil Off in American Pastoral,” Philip Roth Studies 6, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 48. 7. Several scholars have fully elaborated this reading, notably Sigrist-Sutton and Sandra Stanley, “Mourning the Greatest Generation: Myth and History in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral,” Twentieth Century Literature 51, no. 1 (2005).