Word: kepesh
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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...
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...
...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...