The Professor of Desire

In THE PROFESSOR OF DESIRE, Roth intertwines three subjects. These are the academic travails and career of professor David Kepesh; the struggle between the professor's lustful nature and his search for love in marriage; and the simultaneous closeness and distance that exists between the sophisticated professor Kepesh and his parents, who owned a hotel in the Catskills. For each of these subjects, Roth shows a professor Kepesh who is highly conflicted. As a lustful young Fulbright scholar, for example, Kepesh connects to two Swedish college students. As a ménage a trois, they push the boundaries of sex, expressing a need deep in David. But in doing so, Kepesh loses his academic focus and becomes obsessed with the anguish the ménage inflicts on one partner. Later, Kepesh marries Helen, who is an image of female perfection and an apparent solution to his sexual and marital desires. But Helen is unhappy in mundane marriage and tortures David, makes him impotent, and causes him to behave strangely with his pupils. Ultimately, Kepesh is able to sublimate his intense sexual drive, creating a great-books course where sex is the preoccupation of each author. But such sophistication separates him from his salt-of-the-earth parents. And, it does nothing to accommodate professor Kepesh to the ordinariness of a steady relationship and mature love. TPOD is an engrossing book but ultimately very sad, with Kepesh identifying dynamics in his life that resemble the literature of Chekov--where characters are quietly unsatisfied--and Kafka--where a blocked and distorted sexuality often energizes the narrative. Says the professor of desire: "And this life I love and have hardly gotten to know! And robbed by whom? It always comes down to myself!"

Best known for Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, American Pastoral, Philip Roth's introspective 1997 novel, The Professor of Desire, tells the story of Jewish intellectual, David Kepesh, a celebrated literature professor. The Professor of Desire is the second in a trilogy of Kepesh novels; the other two novels are The Breast(1972) and The Dying Animal (2001). While he is brilliant when it comes to literature, David Kepesh lacks understanding when it comes to women. The Professor of Desire not only follows Kepesh's career as an academic, but explores his sexual desires. Kepesh has an obsession for women's breasts, and lusts after female students. His obsession for women annoys them. While studying in London, he is drawn to two Swedish girls, Birgitta and Elisabeth. In California, while teaching literature and writing papers on Chekhov, Kepesh is drawn to a promiscuous woman, Helen. Kepesh then takes a teaching position at New York College, where he teaches Kafka and Flaubert's Madame Bovary, while lusting after his students and fantasizing about Kafka's prostitute. (He thinks of his literature class as "Desire 341.") The Professor of Desire attests to Philip Roth's rare genius as a writer. Highly recommended. G. Merritt

This is the first novel by Philip Roth that I actually like. Portnoy's Complaint was a good hundred-page novella, spread out over a three-hundred page book; the other pages were filled with the dross of his political opinions, and his kvetching about his parents. Operation Shylock was also too pre-occupied with pushing a political agenda (but just what agenda, we are never sure). This is Roth's primary fault as an author - he is too didactic. I find that I really don't care much about what Roth's political opinions are. Ironically, this is probably one of the attributes that make him a critical darling - it shows that he thinks "deep thoughts." The Professor of Desire is blessedly free of politics. In it, Roth sticks with the subjects he knows best: sex and relationships. Young David Kepesh is a sexually frustrated young student. That changes while studying abroad in Swinging London, where he finds that what they say about Swedish girls is true. Things take a turn for the worse after the end of his disastrous marriage finds him crushed by loneliness in New York. With the help of a psychiatrist, Kepesh tries to discover if he will ever be able to commit to anyone or experience happiness. The Professor of Desire finds Roth at a more mature place in his career. Gone is the odious kvetching about his parents that polluted so much of Portnoy's Complaint; the parents in this book are treated with sympathy. At one point, a character points out to Kepesh that there is no point in mining the workings of a Jewish family for his fiction anymore. He is also less homophobic in this novel - but not much so. There are still things about Roth's style that take getting used to; I don't think there's anything profound in his refusal to offset dialogue into separate paragraphs - it just makes it harder to keep track of who is speaking. However, The Professor of Desire is a short, lyrical novel that is the best of anything I've read of his so far.

David Kepesh, the aforementioned professor, towards the end of "Professor of Desire," contemplates the introductory lecture he is to deliver to his class on comparative literature:"Indiscreet, unprofessional, unsavory as portions of these disclosures will surely strike some of you, I nonetheless would like, with your permission, to go ahead now and give an open account to you of the life I formerly led as a human being. I am devoted to fiction, and I assure you that in time I will tell you whatever I may know about it, but in truth nothing lives in me like my life." This passage may as well be an introduction to this book, one of Roth's most potent and stirring novels from his earlier days. Through the chronicles of David Kepesh's early life, Roth examines the paradoxes of love and desire, the bridges between literature and life, and our nearly-lunatic search for identity.In this book, we follow Roth's familiar character David Kepesh from his childhood in the Catskills hotel owned by his parents, to a post-college year of sexual freedom in Scandinavia, to a tempestuous/disastrous marriage to Helen Baird, followed by a winter of despair, and concluding with his relationship with Claire Ovington, marked by a love that is blemished by waning desire.In the end, although more questions are posed than can ever be answered, Roth's novel can resonate with anyone who has ever grappled with the mysteries of love and self-discovery - namely, everyone. And along the way, the reader can revel in the wit, wry humor, and intellect adored by every Roth fan.

Philip Roth's 1972 novella, "The Breast", a take-off on Kafka's story "The Metamorphosis", introduced us to David Kepesh, a professor of Literature, who one morning wakes to find himself transformed into an enormous mammary. David Kepesh reappears as the title character of Roth's 1979 novel, "The Professor of Desire". Besides borrowing characters from the earlier story, Roth works in lots of references to Kafka, includes a long episode describing Kepesh's pilgrimage to Kafka's grave in Prague, and at one point compares Kepesh's relation to his body to K.'s relation to the authorities of "The Castle":". . . I can only compare the body's single-mindedness, its cold indifference and absolute contempt for the well-being of the spirit, to some unyielding, authoritarian regime. And you can petition it all you like, offer up the most heartfelt and dignified and logical sort of appeal - and get no response at all. If anything, a kind of laugh is what you get."I wasn't able to buy all this Kafka business. To me it seemed pasted-on and extrinsic to the spirit of the rest of the novel. But this is quibbling. "The Professor of Desire" is a delightful story, in which Philip Roth exuberantly displays his many quite un-Kafkaesque gifts. First among them is a magical gift for characterization; it seems that every character in this novel, and there are many, springs effortlessly to life as a complete individual, from Herbie Bratasky on the first page to Mr. Barbatnik on the last.And then there's Roth's eerie gift for dialogue. His characters' words seem always to flow from their own personalities, not the author's, and their speeches are often masterpieces of comic invention.Though perhaps it falls short of Roth's best, this is a wonderful book. I heartily recommend it.