Word: roth
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LUST IS THE metaphor for the human condition in Philip Roth's novel, The Professor of Desire. His story of a young man's effort to arrive at sexual and romantic happiness is funny, written with a pungent Rabelasian wit, but marked by an underlying not of wistfulness. He portrays a dissatisfation almost inherent in living, the incompatibility of passion and peace and the transcience of happiness...
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...
...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...
...teaches a course on the great novels of erotic desire and he writes his thesis on romantic disillusionment. His special subject is Chekhov and his interpretation of Chekhov reveals Roth's own intent in this novel...