The Professor of Desire
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The Professor of Desire is a 1977 novel by Philip Roth. It describes the youth, the college years and the academic career of professor David Kepesh, and beside that, his sexual desires.
[edit] Plot summary
David is emotionally insecure. He grows up in the hotel his parents manage, and also there he is influenced by artist Herbie Bratasky, who, thanks to his ingenuity in imitating sounds of farts, defecation and toilet flushing, is credited with "mastering the whole Wagner scale of fecal Storm and Stress".
When he later attends a college, he rooms with a lazy, often-masturbating, homosexual, draft-dodging, fellow student, who inadvertently adds to Kepesh's insecurity. At first, he seems to accept the odd facts about his colleague, but then he's shocked when he's told from others that he deviated from so many social norms.
David, often lusting after female co-students, never accomplishes any successful date. He often annoys girls by telling them they had gorgeous bodily properties. Kepesh, with a Fulbright grant in his pocket, goes to London where he meets two sexually interested Swedish girls, Birgitta and Elisabeth.
Back to America, he moves to California, where he gets acquainted to Helen, a woman dreaming of opening a store of her own. Helen has had a history of promiscuity when she, in her early twenties, lived in Hong Kong and other places in Asia. But back in California, Helen does not feel loved by Kepesh. She refuses to do household duties because Kepesh only gives her sexual attention; but unable to speak out their emotions, Kepesh submits to that "fact" and ends up doing all the work a household entails beside teaching literature classes and writing papers on Anton Chekhov.
At the final stage, Kepesh separates from Helen and goes to New York to give lectures in literature; but his emotional side not formed nor refined yet, he takes endless session at a psychoanalyst's and even uses his literature class (which he later calls "Desire 341" after the course number) to contrast his own desires and experiences with those which are displayed in works like Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary. He even persuades the students to hear and discuss his own love life. On a visit to Prague, birthplace of the equally sexually unexperienced Franz Kafka, he dreams of visiting the still-living prostitute of Kafka, and he insists on seeing her crotch.
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