Word: kepesh
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...David Kepesh, the hero of Roth's novel, is a scholar of literature and lust. "Studious by day, dissolute by night" is David's motto although his career as a sexual prodigy only begins after he has won a Fullbright to study in London. There he meets two Swedish girls; Elizabeth, loving and sweet, and Birgitta, daring and wildly lascivious. The choice is between the hearth or the furnace and, characteristically, David wants both. For a while Kepesh manages to have that but Elizabeth flees the menage a trois and David eventually breaks with Birgitta, recoiling from the destructiveness...
...once a slave to Eros and a master of repression, Kepesh struggles between these two facets of his character. But this set pattern of restlessness, dissatisfaction and destruction continues through his other relationships. He marries Helen, a beautiful, adventurous, femme fatale and then proceeds to try to domesticate her. Their marriage dissolves over quarrels about burnt toast and lost letters. The wreckage of his marriage gives rise to a period of depression and unwilling chastity in David's life. A young teacher named Claire rescues him, and David feels he has found at last a sure and steady happiness...
...those sympathetic lost characters out of Chekhov but the insane amputee in a story by Gogol who places an ad for the return of his lost nose. What Roth succeeds in portraying, though, with all the delicacy and poignancy of the Russian dramatist, is that Kepesh is in fact a figure from a Chekhov novel. Not a warped, disfigured monster but a man whose constant pursuit of love reveals the tragic-comic dimensions of our own lives...
...somber and ludicrous - and no one now writing can juggle these clashing qualities more adroitly than Roth. Also on display are other Roth virtues: an uncanny sense of pacing and an ear for dialogue that approaches perfect pitch. Roth can wring acid comedy from the dishrag of kitchen quarrels. Kepesh recalls a tandem tantrum he had with his wife: " 'I don't believe I am having this discussion,' she says. 'Life isn't toast!' she finally screams. 'It is!' I hear myself maintaining. 'When you sit down to eat toast, life...
...become fashionable to twit Roth for returning so often to characters like Kepesh: enough, already, of Jewish intellectual sex maniacs. Such criticism is self-incriminating, a tribute to Roth's wicked skill at probing nerves and making people who think they know better say silly things. Like most writers who prove they have enough talent for the long haul of a career, Roth has found the story he will tell until either he or it is exhausted. It is a good story and, as The Professor of Desire proves, it gets better with each telling...