Word: roth
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...tomb. The official reason for their trip: a match with the Chinese national soccer squad. Alas for the Cosmos, the Chinese tied the first game and won the second 2-1. "We did not expect to find soccer of this caliber in China," conceded Cosmos Captain Werner Roth. But at a welcoming banquet, the mood was jovial, and the Chinese players eagerly pumped their visitors about AstroTurf and the height of buildings in Manhattan. The curious Chinese will soon find out for themselves. They arrive for a five-game U.S. tour next week and are scheduled to play the Cosmos...
...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...
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...
This conclusion is both 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...
...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...