By Philip Roth
Roth's searing and cold-eyed novel is about the 60s, both the Day-Glo decade and the gray-haired one. Turning 70, Roth's narrator, Professor David Kepesh, finds marriage an institution, as in maximum-security lockdown. When he's not picking apart books on public television, he's picking young women to join a sad conga line of conquests stretching back to the 1960s, when, declaring himself a paragon of "emancipated manhood," he left his wife to enlist in the sexual revolution. But he's about as free as the dog who gets an electric shock every time he tries to stick his nose past the front lawn. Sexually omnivorous and occasionally brutal, Kepesh has a frosty relationship with his 42-year-old son (whom he advises to dump his wife and join the party) and no one to grow old with; instead, he is obsessed with his own "decay all the while." So he hunts such prey as a beautiful 24-year-old student. But the reptilian professor's self-criticism is so honest that it's hard not to feel for him when he argues that even a creature of his years should still be "unapologetically an unmonastic old man susceptible still to the humanly exciting." (Houghton Mifflin, $22)
Bottom Line: Roth creeps closer to the Nobel
Your Reaction
