Volume 19, Number 8 · November 16, 1972
Uplift
By Frederick C. Crews
The Breast
by Philip Roth
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 78 pp., $4.95
We seem to be on familiar ground in the opening pages of The Breast. The hero, David Alan Kepesh, has Alex Portnoy's verbal gifts, his irony, his apparent public success, and his private hypochondria. If his life appears more stable than Portnoy's, so much the better, for Roth's specialty is pulling out the rug. We can be fairly sure that this Stony Brook professor of comparative literature, with his regular bowels and his tidy, if monotonous, modus vivendi with a nice young schoolteacher, is in for some awful surprise. When Kepesh gets an itch in the groin and becomes a kind of monogamous debauchee, grateful to be able to take the initiative with patient, neglected Claire, we know we won't get any Lawrentian smarm about the dark wisdom of the body. In Roth's work strong feelings, especially in the pelvic region, are always symptoms.
Review, 1762 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |