The Professor of Desire
Philip Roth's 1977 novel follows David Kepesh from childhood through graduate school, psychoanalysis, and a series of desires the title deliberately understates. Roth is interested in how lust gets intellectualized, and how that intellectualizing fails. The book is frank without being seductive, comic without being charming, and belongs to the Kepesh trilogy while standing on its own as a portrait of a man trying to think his way out of his own body.Farrar, Straus and Giroux published it in a straightforward literary edition, the kind of book that sat on shelves next to Bellow and Mailer without apology. Roth treats psychoanalysis less as a cure than as another language his characters use to hide from themselves. For readers who prefer their novels cerebral, carnal, and faintly embarrassed by both.
