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PARTISAN REVIEW
THE EDUCATION OF DAVID KEPESH
THE PROFESSOR OF DESIRE.
By
Philip Roth.
Farrar, Straus and
Giroux. $8.95.
The Professor of Desire
is a surprisingly good novel.
Surprising, because after the sharply etched satirical stories of
Good–
bye, Columbus,
Philip Roth has shown himself in novel after novel to
be a writer trapped in the limitations of his real but narrow virtues.
Possessing an unusual gift for social mimicry as well as for zanily
fantastic extrapolations from familiar social behavior, he has repeat–
edly ended up with a proliferation of tics and negative stereotypes
instead of psychologically interesting characters and actions. One can
guess that there is a good deal of uncontrolled rage working through
the novels-in particular, toward two categories of people, women and
Jewish parents-and however much he may seem at first to be treating
his personages with an attempt at balance and fullness (as in the
promising first part of
My Life as a Man),
he is finally unable to
restrain what reads like a spiteful assault on the resented characters in
which he smears them-sometimes quite literally-with their own
filth.
The first fifty pages of
The Professor of Desire
look very much like
Roth's earlier fiction. The narrator, David Kepesh, is another of those
neurotic Jewish intellectuals, vaguely contemptuous of himself, hope–
lessly fixated on the squirming sexual discomforts of his own preco–
cious but also seemingly permanent adolescence as he flounders into
his thirties. (Roth has said in an interview that this Kepesh is not to be
thought of as the same character who is the hero of
The Breast-surely
his most lamentable lapse-but why the two should then have the same
name remains a mystery.) Kepesh's parents run a small kosher hotel in
the Catskills, and he attempts
to
break loose from their restricti ve world
of smoth ering solicitude and nagging exhortations by the simulta–
neous pursuit of literary studies and female pudenda (preferably Gen–
tile).
The most extended episode of. this first section has the disquiet–
ingly familiar Roth look of a fantasy of wish fulfillment substituted for
novelistic invention. Kepesh, during a Fulbright year in England, falls
into a
menage
Ii
trois
with two extravagantly cooperative Swedish girls,
Elisabeth and Birgitta. Elisabeth, it turns out, actually loves him and
