Word: kepesh
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...much as Kepesh may resemble Portnoy and Peter Tarnopol-the protagonist-victim in Roth's My Life as a Man-The Professor of Desire is not simply a rehash of the earlier books. Kepesh's monologue is a more humane and thoughtful handling of the subject that has fascinated and obsessed Roth in print for the past ten years: the woebegone, self-destructive tug of war between high aspirations and low lusts. Kepesh is another of Roth's Jewish centaurs, trying to keep his head in a cloud of pipe smoke while ignoring his pawing hooves...
...novel is Kepesh's feverish attempt to explain how he got that way. The only child of doting parents who run a summer resort in the Catskills, he develops early on a taste for the disreputable in the person of Herbie Bratasky, the New York City-imported social director at his parents' hotel. Herbie can make a whole range of bathroom noises with his mouth and looks as though he may be successful with women. One winter, young Kepesh receives a letter from his hero describing Herbie's latest toilet imitations and, against all the dictates...
Such a precariously balanced conscience at so tender an age leaves Kepesh nowhere to go but down, then up, then down again. It is a pattern that comes to define his life. At college, uncooperative coeds help him keep naughty Kepesh at bay; nice Kepesh becomes a perceptive student of Anton Chekhov's "romantic disillusionment" and wins a Fulbright scholarship. In London, disaster - and on the other hand, bliss. Kepesh takes up lodgings with two Swedish girls, one of whom outstrips his most humid sexual fantasies...
Birgitta is "sane, clever, courageous, self-possessed - and wildly lascivious! Just what I've always wanted." Kepesh's studies suffer as a result of his debauches, and he naturally runs from Birgitta and be comes a sobersided graduate student at Stanford. There he meets an exotic beauty with a mysterious past in Hong Kong and, of course, marries into a life of predictable miseries, the only outcome of which can be divorce and another retreat...
...Kepesh's ultimate fate is never in doubt - or at least will not be to readers familiar with Roth's work. In The Breast (1972), David Kepesh suffers a Kafkaesque transformation from man to mammary. Kepesh of course cannot know that such a thing will happen to him (since this novel is narrated before events in The Breast begin). But the reader's knowledge of the surrealistic enchantment that awaits Kepesh lends a poignancy to his struggles. Try as he may to be good, flesh will subsume him at last. At the end of his narrative, Kepesh...