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does great violence to her own nature in order to satisfy the combina–
tory convolutions of his sexual whims. Birgitta, on the other hand, is
a real sexual rogue, eager to explore every avenue of
outrance
and
debasement with or for Kepesh. "Yes, there is Elisabeth's unfath–
omable and wonderful love and there is Birgitta's unfathomable and
wonderful daring,
and whichever I want I can have.
Now isn't
that
unfathomable I Either the furnace or the hearth!"
At first this sounds like too many erotic goodies to be true, but
what
I
think emerges as the novel develops is that the very schematism
of the female pair is quite deliberate, and helps make a point. For even
more than Roth's earlier fiction, this is a self-consciously "Freudian"
novel, and the psychodynamics of desire are meant to be defined
through the symmetry of an avowed schema-furnace and hearth, the
woman who becomes the polymorphous accomplice of the dangerous
id, and the woman linked with refuge and order, with ero assimilated
to the demands of the superego.
The polarities of Elisabeth and Birgitta are then reproduced on a
higher level, with a psychological persuasiveness new for Roth, in the
two women with whom Kepesh is involved (this time, serially) for the
rest of the novel.
If
Birgitta, as the associations of her name suggest, is a
simple, provocative sex kitten, Helen, whom Kepesh marries in gradu–
ate school, is a glamorous romantic adventuress-she has lived in the
Far East as the mistress of an immensely powerful, rather sinister
man-and she is presented without apology as The Most Beautiful
Woman Kepesh has ever seen, Helen of Troy being duly invoked. The
marriage, of course, is hopeless from the start, Helen, with her hour–
long baths and facial saunas and high-priced cosmetics and dazzling
wardrobe, incapable of understanding Kepesh's need for order in daily
life and for serious intellectual work. Roth renders the slow, rasping
breakdown of the marriage with a wonderful ear for the petty, deadly
abrasiveness of conjugal dialogue, and at the same time he manages to
give Helen her due, firmly perceiving that Kepesh is as impossible for
her as she is for Kepesh.
After the divorce, Kepesh, now an assistant professor of compara–
tive literature living in New York, is rescued from depression and
impotence by Claire, with whom he is still sharing an idyll of domestic
bliss and erotic solace at the end of the novel, an idyll he is sure will
soon crumble.
Her
name, of course, suggests "light," and she is
obviously a sublimer Elisabeth, truly devoted
to
Kepesh, frank, opti–
mistic, sexually tender though decidedly unexperimental, and with a
rare gift for creating lucid order around her. She gives him everything
he needs to pull his devastated life together again, but she is finally too
