Stade was being dramatic, I think, given how much good literary writing about sex came out in the United States around the same time as Portnoy’s Complaint. Erica Jong, James Salter, and John Updike all relied heavily on sex scenes to externalize their characters’ inner lives. Nettie Jones’s deliriously sexy Fish Tales, which came out in 1984, has recently won a new generation of readers, as has Norman Rush’s Mating, first published in 1991. But Stade was right that American book culture has a puritan strain, one that showed in Portnoy’s reception and that manifests today as a surprising absence of sex—of straight sex, that is—in literature.