Word: kepesh
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...Counterlife (1987), Philip Roth remarked, "If I ever wrote an autobiography, I'd call it The Counterbook." Fat chance, or so it seemed at the time. For nearly 30 years, Roth had been hearing accusations that he was merely a closet biographer, that his heroes, whether named David Kepesh, Peter Tarnopol, Alexander Portnoy or Nathan Zuckerman, were simply transparent disguises for their self-obsessed creator. Finding that denials did nothing to stem such charges, Roth responded by heaping coals on controversy. Did some readers accuse him of anti-Semitism? Very well. Roth gave them and the world Portnoy's Complaint...
...forever flattened the myth of the glamorous writing life. Zuckerman, of course, is not Roth but rather the fullest and most personal expression of a theme that has come to dominate his work: the mayhem unleashed by those who would escape their pasts. This may be what David Kepesh in Roth's The Professor of Desire had in mind when he spoke stiltedly of "the destructive power-of those who see a way out of the shell of restrictions and convention, out of the pervasive boredom and the stifling despair, out of the painful marital situations and the endemic...
...living room with my Gillette razor in her hand, waiting "patiently for me to finish talking with my undergraduate harlot and come on home so that she could get on with the job of almost killing herself." An apotheosis of erotic obsession is achieved by a character named David Kepesh, who is transformed into a 155-lb. female breast...
...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...