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image of this sense of life. The self-conscious Professor Kepesh actually
summarizes the scene in which he finds himself by describing it as a
Chekhov story. Then, appropriately, he reverses field and wonders
whether, because he is such a grotesque and not one of Chekhov's
quietly unspectacular sufferers, Gogol might be a more apposite
model. Nevertheless, this final episode has a muted meditative quality,
a plangency, which succeed in being vaguely Chekhovian. At the very
end, Kepesh is chilled by the knowledge that he himself and those to
whom he is bound in affection are as vulnerably mortal as the
flowering of desire with which he has been obsessed since puberty.
In the guest room of his rented summer house, his father sleeps
alongside a crony, Mr. Barbatnik-who, at Kepesh 's insistance, has just
told his story of survival in a concentration camp. Kepesh wakes from a
swarm of bad dreams to cling to Claire's welcoming body. But even in
the mounting rhythm of their physical passion, he is daunted by the
awful fragility of everything he seems to possess: "Even as I pit all my
accumulated happiness, and all my hope, against my fear of transfor–
mations yet
to
come, I wait
to
hear the most dreadful sound imaginable
emerge from the room where Mr. Barbatnik and my father lie alone and
insensate, each in his freshly made bed." That final phrase, so right as
an understated image of tenuous comfort and refuge, might be a
deliberate echo of "each in its ordered place," the gesture of illusory
harmony in a world of radical disorder with which
The Sound and The
Fury
concludes. But this moment has its own poignancy, which is a
new note for Roth. It offers hope that, after nearly twenty years in the
wilderness of Borscht Circuit routines and sexual psychodramas, this
talented writer may be coming of age.
ROBERT ALTER
