Another Side of Philip Roth

...But such talk should be taken with a grain of salt...

...It's nothing, really, says the Professor of Desire, who then adds: "But what nothing...

...What he finds there is narcissism, and he comes to understand it with the dramatic assistance of a psychoanalyst...

...Just as Annie Hall is striking for the way in which it portrays, at long last, Woody Allen's vision of the possibility of a reasonably healthy heterosexual adult love relationship)— albeit one filled with problems and not sufficiently strong to overcome them—so Roth's new novel is about the attainment of a similarly blessed state, precarious, perhaps, but promising as well...

...So far, so bad...

...He continued: "You know, when you're at your typewriter, you don't worry whether peoWilliam Novak is a contributing editor of MOMENT...

...Kafka—or Kafka's spirit—plays a major role in the third part of the trilogy as well, The Professor of Desire, Roth's latest work...

...He makes a very modest living teaching Hebrew school, where a nine-year-old boy and his friends are among his unwilling students...

...The episode is bizarre, dramatic and self-mocking at the same time...

...None of his writings has been published in America, where he is utterly anonymous...

...In as moving and tender a scene as Roth has ever constructed, David and Claire are visited by David's retiring father, who brings with him a friend who has survived the Holocaust...

...It has been said that a poem's ancestors are other poems...

...The new novel picks up where this one rested, and its main concern is the next stage: the ability of the self to relate to another...

...But side by side with these concerns there have always been the others, equally important, simply less prone to attract attention...

...Like Kepesh, we are struck by both the beauty and the simplicity of it all, and by how remote is this new life from his own exotic dreams—or Kafka's troubling nightmares...

...Which brings up the problem of Roth's women characters...

...So drastic a critical error may be a tribute to the powers of literary creativity, or to the inability of some readers to imagine those powers, but to a writer like Roth, who is above all an intensely serious artist, it was also no blessing...

...Armed with this new awareness and self-acceptance, David rents a house with Claire for the summer, in the Catskills of his boyhood, and in this setting of pastoral innocence, and a tender, understated and convincing portrayal of two mature adults in love, David prepares his fall lectures while Claire works in the garden...

...At the cemetery, he bribes the attendant, who shows him Kafka's grave...

...predictably, David is still sufficiently neurotic that he has trouble believing that all of this is really happening, and he fears that something must be given up in order for so much to be gained...

...Upon leaving, the professor feels purged, only to experience afterward a most amazing dream in which he is brought by a guide to interview a woman who was Kafka's whore...

...He is invited to dinner by the boy's family, and is introduced to the inevitable maiden aunt...

...Unfortunately, the first half of The Professor of Desire gives little indication of the breakthrough that will occur before it is over, and some readers may not have the patience to wait...

...Kafka...

...Allen's movie and Roth's novel are together as effective an advertisement for the possibilities of successful psychotherapy as we have seen in a long while...

...My Life as a Man is ultimately about a man searching for his own true self, beyond all the distortions, and finally coming upon "this me who is me being me and none other...

...Claire is a credible, self-confident, realistic and loving woman whose goodness is strong and evident without being cloying or self-righteous...

...The first component of the trilogy is the remarkable short story "Looking at Kafka," which is reprinted in Reading Myself and Others, a collection of essays, interviews and other pieces by Roth published two years ago...

...For a while, their relationship looks promising, and then, suddenly and mysteriously it breaks down...

...Helen Kepesh is a creature of extremes—hysteria, in this case, although in other cases it is depression that immobilizes...

...This, as we have seen, was also Peter Tarnopol's problem, and where Tarnopol worked it out through writing, Kepesh is a reader...

...This may sound overly innocent," he replied, "but I didn't...

...Nations go to war for this kind of nothing, and in the absence of such nothing, people shrivel up and die...

...Franz Kafka, destitute, unknown, penniless, lives alone in a rooming-house in Newark...

...He worries that his passion may be spent, his desire lost, and the drives that have been part of his identity no longer available...

...pie are going to think, 'My God, that must be Roth himself—how beastly!' You've got other things to worry about, rather more to the point of what you're doing, which is trying to write convincing fiction.'''' After Portnoy—and perhaps because of it—Roth turned his attention to other concerns...

...But like Roth reading Kafka, unable to do so "objectively," Kepesh finds himself deeply involved with the authors whose works he teaches, including Kafka, Gogol, Tolstoy and Chekhov—to the extent of preferring the literary life to his own...

...For Philip Roth, ever since the book that made him famous almost nine years ago, that has meant that he is seen as Alexander Portnoy...

...Kepesh as a graduate student, however, learns more about the sexual behavior of women than about the great classics...

...In a recent interview, Roth was asked whether he hadn't expected that Roth and Portnoy would be fused into the same person...

...indeed, even Roth's admirers have not always been aware of them...

...But we never get close enough to David Kepesh in the first half of the book to really care about what becomes of him, and certainly no other character makes a serious claim on our attention...

...The visit of the two older men to the young couple is described with a full measure of humor, but here it is again mixed with a gentleness and a calm which softens the edges of the comedy and provides a rich, attractive, emotional texture...

...something to do with sex—the details are unclear...

...Halfway through the novel, David Kepesh, professor of literature, makes a pilgrimage to Kafka's grave in Prague...

...after all, Kafka escaping...

...Like Woody Allen, who has also created a series of stories revolving around the inner life of a neurotic and funny Jewish intellectual, Roth in his new work makes a dramatic shift in focus...

...And then, suddenly, there is a shift...

...Asked whether these two books really represented a new direction, Roth replied that "the tendency to comedy that's been present even in my most somber books and stories was allowed to take charge of my imagination and lead it where it would...

...But while the ending is unresolved, we are left with what in its own subtle and modest terms is Roth's most ambitious achievement to date: a tender evocation of healthy, mature love...

...We first meet David Kepesh as a young boy whose parents own a small Catskill resort, a situation which presents a perfect opportunity for the author to introduce a small gallery of Rothian characters and moments...

...The same Dr...

...The Great American Novel (1973) was a fantasy about baseball...

...But nobody who has read or re-read Goodbye, Columbus, particularly after seeing the movie, can help being struck not only by Roth's interest in the social behavior of middle-class suburban Jews, but also by his depiction of their emotional landscapes, their private fears and hopes, and, most prominently, the inner life of the young man who narrates the story...

...There is no lack of humor in these more recent works, but here it serves a rather different purpose, as one of several main ingredients in a new emotional recipe whose total effect is more of a quiet introspection than a howling expose...

...It is ironic that the feminist writers who almost ritually attack Roth for his supposed sin so often go on to produce pale imitations of his work...

...Spielvogel lives as a formidable character, and one of the many achievements of My Life as a Man is the dialogue, often stormy but ultimately productive, between analyst and patient...

...occasionally, a writer becomes deeply involved with the work and life of one of his predecessors...

...It is a scene elegant in its simplicity, and remarkably understated, but it is in dramatic contrast to the first half of this book, and to Roth's other recent male characters, with their relentless ability to make themselves miserable...

...David meets Claire Ovington, a New York schoolteacher from Schenectady, and wonder of wonders, he falls in love with a woman who will be neither his master nor his slave, but rather a potential full partner in his life...

...Helen is a little too grotesque for us to believe in, or care about, and even the poor professor to whom she is married soon tires of her antics, and after jetting to Hong Kong to rescue her from a ridiculous adventure, he decides he would be better off alone...

...Our Gang (1971) was a satirical treatment of Nixonian politics which seemed to be simply too wild until Watergate, when it became clear that life does imitate art...

...Roth's comic gifts and more outrageous literary experiments have always attracted much attention and controversy...

...Considering how deeply some writers have been involved with Freudian psychotherapy, it is worth noting how few of them have portrayed a living, breathing psychiatrist who is other than a foil or a villain...

...If all this sounds too good to be true—or interesting—let it be said that the novel ends on a moment of hesitation...

...A REVIEW ESSAY ANOTHER SIDE OF PHIUP ROTH WILLIAM NOVAK The successful novelist is, inevitably, a celebrity, and, like other celebrities, it is his fate to be known less by the company he keeps than by the characters he creates...

...Looking at Kafka's last year of life, in 1924, Roth is fascinated by what might have happened had Kafka not died at the age of forty, but lived on another three decades or so...

...Roth, after all, is particularly interested in the differences between men and women, and the feminist writers deal with that same subject, from a different point of view...

...The story begins as a literary and biographical look at Kafka—begins, in fact, as an article, and gradually shifts into a fictional mode as the author finds himself too personally involved in Kafka's life to make of it anything so remote as an article...

...But his latest set of concerns, like his humor, have always been present in his work...

...Published in 1974, this is perhaps the most ambitious of Roth's books, and although it has a number of flaws, it is intellectually his most satisfying novel...

...It is interesting, too, that in recent years Roth has edited a series of books introducing to an American audience the works of writers from Eastern Europe...

...By 1973, however, Roth was ready for another change...

...He is obsessed with Kafka, about whom he wants to know everything...

...But suppose, nonetheless, he had escaped, making his way across the ocean to America...

...Among other twists and turns is Peter's confrontation with the fact that various people in his life, including both his ex-wife and his psychiatrist, have the same right he insists upon—the right to turn life into literature...

...Through a series of Borges-like reflections and distortions, including some fascinating interplays between life and art, literature and criticism, and the like, a Jewish writer named Peter Tarnopol examines his inner life...

...Because the response to the book made it—as Roth himself observed—more of an event than a novel—many people who should have known better concluded that Portnoy was an extension of Roth rather than a product of his imagination...

...And so ends the first half of the book, with Kepesh unhappy and lonely...

...With Kafka and Freud leading the way, David Kepesh, professor of literature and lust, stumbles down the road that leads from the bizarre to the normal...

...The Professor of Desire is thus strongly related to "Looking at Kafka," but it is no less connected to the middle part of the trilogy, My Life as a Man...

...a recapitulation of Roth's previous achievements, and although the narrative style here is as finely crafted as ever, we have come to expect more from an author who has generally managed to say something new in each book...

...In these works, Roth has surpassed himself, going beyond the books that made him famous, and if the more recent writings have attracted somewhat less of a public following than they deserve, perhaps that is because they make more demands on the reader...

...And those real issues turn out to be more modest and less spectacular than the questions that Portnoy has chosen to answer...

...And now, following his more overtly comic books, Roth has turned around and written a kind of trilogy about the inner life of a Jewish man, his search for spiritual roots, his exploration of the personal details of maleness—the other side of Portnoy's complaint, as it were...

...Eventually David sees that he must get beyond all this imitative stuff, and tells himself, "I must stop impersonating others and Become Myself, or at least begin to impersonate the self I believe I ought to be...

...Spielvogel who sat patiently and silently through the entire Portnoy narrative, surfaces here as a serious and compelling character...

...the second, a confrontation...

...It is the only one that is cared for, and Kepesh speculates on the irony whereby only the childless bachelor appears to have living progeny...

...But on one point, at least, the feminists are right: Roth has had trouble, to put it kindly, in creating credible women characters...

...And here begins one of the most unusual and intriguing documents in modern Jewish literature...

...It is as though Roth took seriously the last line in Portnoy, the "punch line" in which the analyst says to his patient, in effect, that all he has said up to that point is simply the introduction to the real issues...

...what David has, Portnoy could not have attained—nor would he have wanted to, either...

...The very idea, Roth admits, is preposterous...

...But we have met most of them before, in one guise or another, or at least we feel we have, and even the relatively memorable Herbie Bra-tasky, whose chief claim to literary immortality lies in his remarkable ability to imitate the sound of a flushing toilet (together with several related noises) may be sooner forgotten by the reader than by the admiring young boy who becomes his protege...

...And whatever else Portnoy's Complaint may be, it is above all an intense self-examination by a man who is so eager to look into his own heart and soul that the entire narrative is represented as issuing from the couch of his analyst's office...

...Their relationship fails, but Kafka lives on, alone, for another decade, until one day he dies...

...Like so many of the women in Roth's book, Mrs...

...And perhaps he is right...

...They have often gone unnoticed, leading to easy talk of a "new Roth...

...Mailer chose Hemingway, and in as opposite a pairing as could be imagined, Roth has chosen Kafka...

...Kepesh himself is astonished to be here, where, as he puts it, "two industrious, responsible, idealistic schoolteachers should have adhered to one another like dumb sea creatures," and pronounces himself the happiest man in the world...

...Studying abroad, he takes that phrase a little too literally, returning home, finally, to marry the flamboyant and self-indulgent Helen Baird...

...But his came while playing baseball on a Sunday morning...

...She accompanies Kepesh to Kafka's grave, and goes with him when he visits a Czech dissident, from whom he learns that it is not his own destiny to be Kafka, or even to be a dissident in Prague, but rather that he must live out his life as David Kepesh, whose problems and issues are no less important for being private and something less than earthshaking...

...The first case represents an escape...

...in the climactic last sentence of the book...

...But what if . . . what if, like Max Brod, his companion, Kafka had escaped...

...The answer is painfully obvious: like the rest of the Jewish community in Prague, he would have perished in the Holocaust...

...the men in the trilogy are more concerned with their identity as writers, readers, men— and as Jews, although the Jewish issues are approached mostly from the sides and the corners...

...It is worth recalling that Portnoy once made a similar pronouncement...

...Whatever its exact significance, it marks, as we shall see, a dramatic turning point not only in the book, but in all of Roth's work, as well...