The Breast
Philip Roth's 1972 novella is a deliberately odd object: David Kepesh, a literature professor, wakes one morning to discover he has been transformed into a giant breast. The premise is Kafka relocated to a New York suburb, and Roth treats it with the clinical bitterness that characterized his early work. Kepesh catalogues sensation, memory, and the logistics of desire from inside a body he cannot control, while the novel asks whether identity is anything more than the sum of its appetites.Holt, Rinehart and Winston published it in a compact hardcover, a format that suits the book's austere joke. It is short, grotesque, and more interested in embarrassment than titillation. The right reader is the one who finds Kafka's anxiety relocated to a Long Island suburb both funnier and more honest than most domestic realism.
