Return of a Jewish Centaur

By Paul Gray

THE PROFESSOR OF DESIRE by Philip Roth

Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 263 pages; $8.95

The hero of Philip Roth's tenth book is Jewish and unhappy. So what else, as Alexander Portnoy's mother might say, is new? Indeed, David Kepesh is the same slick monologuist that Portnoy was, given to frequent exclamations, flurries of rhetorical questions ("Is she not the single most desirable creature I have ever known?") and carefully italicized emphases. He tosses off one-liners (calling, for instance, his Aunt Sylvia "the Benvenuto Cellini of strudel") as if he has a stable of Borscht Belt writers churning out his material. On the psychiatric couch, Kepesh is a regular lie-down comic: "I cannot maintain an erection, Dr. Klinger. I cannot maintain a smile, for that matter."

But as 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.

The novel is Kepesh's feverish attempt to explain how he got that way. The only child of doting parents who run a summer resort in the Catskills, he develops early on a taste for the disreputable in the person of Herbie Bratasky, the New York City-imported social director at his parents' hotel. Herbie can make a whole range of bathroom noises with his mouth and looks as though he may be successful with women. One winter, young Kepesh receives a letter from his hero describing Herbie's latest toilet imitations and, against all the dictates of prudence, carries it around in his trousers. "Of course," he remembers, "I am terrified that if I should drown while ice skating or break my neck while sledding, the envelope postmarked BROOKLYN, NY will be found by one of my schoolmates, and they will all stand around my corpse holding their noses."

Such a precariously balanced conscience at so tender an age leaves Kepesh nowhere to go but down, then up, then down again. It is a pattern that comes to define his life. At college, uncooperative coeds help him keep naughty Kepesh at bay; nice Kepesh becomes a perceptive student of Anton Chekhov's "romantic disillusionment" and wins a Fulbright scholarship. In London, disaster -- and on the other hand, bliss. Kepesh takes up lodgings with two Swedish girls, one of whom outstrips his most humid sexual fantasies.

Birgitta is "sane, clever, courageous, self-possessed -- and wildly lascivious! Just what I've always wanted." Kepesh's studies suffer as a result of his debauches, and he naturally runs from Birgitta and be comes a sobersided graduate student at Stanford. There he meets an exotic beauty with a mysterious past in Hong Kong and, of course, marries into a life of predictable miseries, the only outcome of which can be divorce and another retreat.

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 nuzzles the good woman whom he loves to the point of boredom and worries about "my fear of transformations yet to come."

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 to eat toast, life is toast. And when you take out the garbage, life is garbage! You can't leave the garbage halfway down the stairs, Helen. It belongs in the can in the yard. Covered.' 'I forgot it.' 'How can you forget it when it's already in your hand?' 'Perhaps, dear, because it's garbage.' "

It has 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.

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