Roth's Novelistic Alchemy

...He shows us that for Kepesh, lust is unsatisfied: The teacher of the great novels of disillusionment and renunciation cannot disavow his desires...

...still more impressive is the author's convincing evidence that it is doomed...

...And there is the eye that misses no telling detail: The man who has taken over the Hungarian Royale explains Labor-Day vacancies to Ke-pesh's father, "meanwhile working two Maalox tablets out of their silver wrapping...

...Curbing the side of him that is "susceptible to the most bewildering and debilitating temptations," he finishes his graduate work with a renewed sense of virtue-until he meets Helen, a beautiful adventuress who had run away to Hong Kong at 18 with a married lover twice her age...

...At 20, though, he turns away in disgust from "that cloying acting...

...There are the old concerns: the Jewish background, sexual exploits, failed marriages, psychoanalytic sessions, the relation of literature to life...

...Ordinarily, novels where someone just happens to be reading a great work at the right time are parasitic affairs, yet Roth's professor of literature can make his references naturally and honestly...

...As she drifts into drink and dope, David lives exclusively in the classroom...

...Listen to an aging homosexual describing an elegant masquerade party held on an island in the Gulf of Siam: "Chips, of course, got all the little native boys stripped down, with just a little cocoa-nut shell around their how-de-dos, and Christmas tinsel streaming down around their necks...

...The opening-in the Kepesh family's Catskill hotel where David spends his childhood-appears to promise that Roth will once again do what he has called "my number...

...Helen hates books...

...Their cup runneth over, but Kepesh must pit "all my accumulated happiness...

...What is more, Roth told the interviewer, "not all the ingenuity of all the English teachers in all the English departments in America could put David Kepesh together again...

...engaged at every level with not reaching a climax...

...Biggest Jewish racket since Meyer Lansky...

...Under Roth's editorship, a number of their works have been published here in the Penguin series, "Writers from the Other Europe...

...What a sight they were when the wind blew...

...What a marvelous, chilling conclusion that would have made...

...its artistry is less self-conscious and more complex...

...The boy's first mentor, or "tempter," is Herbie Bratasky, social director, band-leader, crooner, and clown—"our Jewish Krupa, our Jewish Cugat...

...After his mother's death, the food she has cooked, frozen and neatly labelled continues to nourish her son...

...other than it is...

...Kepesh is soon cast as the fussy, arid schoolmaster...

...The criticism of aspects of Jewish-American life that aroused strong negative feelings from some readers of the earlier writings is not concentrated in the rage of a central character...

...The undergraduate has written what the professor is just beginning to learn: "We are born innocent, we suffer terrible disillusionment before we can gain knowledge, and then we fear death-and we are granted only fragmentary happiness to offset the pain...

...on the front of the Sunday Times" he tells David...

...Similarly, his portrait of a Czechoslovak dissident, who allays Kepesh's fears that the sexual interpretation of The Castle is disrespectful to the Czech view of Kafka as a prophet of bureaucratic misery, takes on authority from the novelist's wide acquaintance with Eastern European writers...

...On a wild hitchhiking trip through Europe with Birgitta, his lewd Swedish soulmate, he explores his-and her-most secret desires...

...They should stay together, she vainly argues, for he is a whoremaster by nature, perhaps a rapist...

...Had there been such an escape route, Kepesh-a professor of literature well acquainted with the metamorphoses imagined by Kafka, Gogol and Swift-would have found it...

...There, however, another Kepesh takes over: the apprentice to erotic abandon...

...If a faint echo of early Salinger is audible in this scene, it is Roth's familiar voice that we hear most steadily throughout the book...

...Moreover, he converts his readings of the great stories into tales told out of school, texts taken to heart...

...each sentence of Chekhov's stories alludes, he feels, to his own plight...

...The "herring king," the "apple king" and other guests at the Hungarian Royale are "mesmerized by Herbie's shameless exhibitionism," but because David's "Mosaic dad" has forbidden the public performance of his most sensational act, only David is privileged to hear his simulation of toilet sounds, from the undoing of a zipper to the "whoosh of the flush...

...Correcting student papers even on a plane from Hong Kong-where he has gone to rescue his runaway wife, imprisoned on a drug charge trumped up by her ex-lover-he weeps when he reads the summary of Chekhov's "overall philosophy" by a "sweet, chubby...

...In The Professor ofDesire (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 263 pp., $8.95) he gives us the full pre-Breast curriculum vitae of Kepesh, the scholar of comparative literature, sensuality and conscience...

...Virtue...

...It is right, for example, for Kepesh to see The Castle as "primarily linked to Kafka's own erotic blockage...

...On a metaphorical level," The Professor of Desire is a marvel of quicksilver...

...Transformation, forbidden in The Breast after the final metamorphosis has occurred, is the very stuff of this novel, from the first encounter with Herbie Bratasky-artist of the quick change and the polymorphous perverse-to the alchemy of the father's gift at the end to his son: 32 Shakespeare coins, one for each play...

...No hope of this kind existed for The Breast, who could not view his predicament as figurative...

...Later, he changes his mind and marries her, deciding instead that "she is without fantasy...

...Equally novel is the vision of felicity Roth grants to Kepesh when he meets Clare, an "extraordinary ordinary person...

...By the time he is 18, a freshman at Syracuse, the "acolyte" is almost as good a mimic as Herbie, imitating him and other vivid resort characters for his friends and starring in college theatricals...

...But Philip Roth has, if only by moving backward...

...As I was to find, too, the novella is an arresting and wonderfully economical tour de force, but it seems to advertise its own cleverness...

...The metal or the words...

...and those poor innocent bookworms who do the teaching turn it into something worse...

...Although 1 knew it was a "sequel" to the current work, that knowledge was vague enough to keep me from straining for clues to the professor's fate it the expense of absorption in the life-which would have been an academic exercise in both senses of the word, since the calamity defies explanation...

...How can he change his nature...

...He exhibits a fresh tenderness toward his people, above all the parents, who are serious and intelligent, often funny but never ridiculous...

...Instead, it is voiced by the decent, liberal father, by his dear friend (a concentration-camp survivor) and by a raunchy poet who will not write about his devoted love for his sad family...

...unharmed and as yet unhorrified daughter of Beverly Hills...

...That self is a student of literature, serious enough to earn a fellowship year abroad...

...they "turn everything about life into something...

...At first her nostalgia for the good colonial life in Rangoon and Mandalay strikes David as evidence of "a corny mentality from Screen Romance...

...What is new-and rich and strange-about The Professor of Desire is a refinement of Roth's method and a significant shift in his perspective...

...A powerful closing scene brings together David's father and the survivor friend with the blissful couple on a summer weekend...

...The rendering of their wholesome intimacy is very moving...

...against my fear of transformations yet to come...

...so total is her concentration and the ingenuity with which she sounds her desire...

...besides, they will appreciate in value...

...When at last he decides to go home alone to resume his "serious education," he tells her that they have no future: "We could never go back to ordinary sex— we've upped the ante much too much...

...For him there is no way out of his monstrous situation, not even through literary interpretation...

...My enjoyment of Roth's latest novel would have been considerable whether I saw it as a reconstruction of Kepesh or an entirely new creation, yet it was probably increased by my having missed The Breast when it came out and reading it afterward...

...In the Chekhovian climax, Kepesh recalls the last line of "The Lady with the Lapdog...

...Ah these noble, middle-aged Jewish sons...

...1 must stop impersonating others and Become Myself, or at least begin to impersonate the self 1 believe 1 ought now to be...

...There is also, as always, the high-fidelity ear...

...The Professor of Desire does not need to announce its virtuosity to the reader...

...The line, he said upon hearing it from an interviewer, should have been delivered by the story's David Kepesh in his desperate effort to understand why he had become a six-foot mammary gland slung into a hammock in a private room on the seventh floor of Lenox Hill Hospital...

...Writers & Writing ROTH'S NOVELISTIC ALCHEMY BY RUTH MATHEWSON Philip roth responded like a comedian discovering his ideal straight man when a critic complained about his novella The Breast that "on a metaphorical level, the fantasy remains rather opaque...

...he reminds us that Roth has acknowledged his debt to Henny Youngman as well as to Henry James...

...Roth's own knowledge of Kafka, revealed in his critical essays, is much broader...

...They can be displayed in class, the father points out...