480
PARTISAN REVIEW
much hearth for this man haunted by the perilous intensities of the
erotic furnace, and he gloomily imagines his desire for her gradually
dying into cold ash.
Despite the title, and despite all I have said, the book is not merely
a study of the problematics of desire.
It
is rather a novel about the
painful attempt to grow up (earlier Roth protagonists don't try so
manfully), to confront one's own nature, to make some kind of
coherence in one's life against the terrible centrifugal pull of an adult
awareness of human mortality. The narrative that begins with erotic
sensations eventually touches unexpectedly deep feelings. Roth han–
dles the wrench caused by the death of Kepesh 's mother with artistic
tact and with just the right note of sad comedy, and those same
qualities are observable in his treatment of Kepesh's father in the last
scene of the novel. The old man is blustering, overbearing, moralistic,
obtuse, a grotesque capti ve of his lifelong personal and ethnic reflexes,
and yet he dearly loves his son, and the son, though discomfited and
fatigued by his father, recognizes this, trembles at the thought of the
father's possibly imminent demise.
The repeated allusions to the literary texts with which Kepesh is
professionally concerned eventually help focus this larger perspective
of implication for the novel, which at first seemed circumscribed by the
special case of one character's neuroses. Roth, I would suggest, is less
essentially a "Jewish" novelist than a perfect novelist for the new mass
audience of university-educated people touched in varying degrees by
intellectuality-from the readers of
The New York Review of Books
(of
the reviews in the front as well as of the personal ads in the back)
to
the
audiences for whom Woody Allen intends the easy intellectual allu–
sions in his films. The literary tradition Roth invokes is pretty much
limited
to
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and is exclusively
composed of works and authors that get onto the reading lists of
standard Great Books courses: Flaubert, Gogol, Chekhov, Tolstoi,
Hawthorne, Melville, James, Kafka. What is important is that here he
makes this selective tradition work as a means of defining the world of
his novel. Ingeniously, at one point he smuggles into the narrative
exactly the generalization about the human condition he wants to
emerge from his protagonist's experience by quoting from an under–
graduate paper submitted to Kepesh on "Anton Chekhov's overall
philosophy of life": "We are born innocent, we suffer terrible disillu–
sionment before we gain knowledge, and then we fear death-and we
are granted only fragmentary happiness to offset the pain."
The concluding pages of the novel are a beautifully dramatized
