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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.