Word: portnoy
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Transatlantic Blues is about a different purgatory: that clammy conscience-ridden cell between worldly success and a proud otherworldly tradition. Stylistically, the novel is the nonstop confession of Monty (né Pendrid) Chatworth, a British-born American TV interviewer. He is something of an Anglo-American Alexander Portnoy, but with a crucial difference. Portnoy, draped over a psychiatrist's couch, complained that his lust was repugnant to his stern Hebraic morality and that his morality was repugnant to his sexual nature. Chatworth, slumped in his seat high above the Atlantic, confesses to his tape recorder ("Father Sony") that...
...some respects, The Professor of Desire recalls Roth's earlier, most sensationalistic and best-known novel, Portnoy's Complaint. The plots of both books are quite similar-two bright, young Jewish men who have an overwhelming obsession with sex. The Professor of Desire, however, is much more sophisticated and accomplished. While David first appears in the book as a brash, precocious adolescent, he develops and matures throughout the course of the novel, whereas Portnoy's Complaint is the story of retarded adolescence. The explicitness and concern with sexual identity remain in The Professor of Desire but Roth is less intent...
...Unlike Portnoy's Complaint, David's Jewishness is a minor motif. Although he treats David's childhood, growing up in his father's Jewish resort hotel, humorously, Roth is not interested in painting the expose of American Jewish life that he did in Portnoy's Complaint. Judaism is mainly a symbol. The Jew as an exile and survivor is used in conjunction with Roth's depiction of the ceaseless quest for love which, when found, fades only for the search to be renewed. As one of David's students writes in an essay: "The search for intimacy, not because...
...hero of Philip Roth's tenth book is Jewish and unhappy. So what else, as Alexander Portnoy's mother might say, is new? Indeed, David Kepesh is the same slick monologuist that Portnoy was, given to frequent exclamations, flurries of rhetorical questions ("Is she not the single most desirable creature I have ever known?") and carefully italicized emphases. He tosses off one-liners (calling, for instance, his Aunt Sylvia "the Benvenuto Cellini of strudel") as if he has a stable of Borscht Belt writers churning out his material. On the psychiatric couch, Kepesh is a regular lie-down...
...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...