The Professor of Desire
Philip Roth
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
<p><p>Philip Roth's new book is the story of an adventurous man of intelligence and feeling trying to make his way to both pleasure <I>and </I>dignity through a world of sensual possibilities. Temptation comes to him in both ordinary and spectacular forms, and the novel charts the history of his desire from the early years, when he accedes to it totally, to the time when he attempts to domesticate his passions (and his wife's) and finally to that most surprising moment when desire ebbs and, frighteningly, seems on the brink of disappearance. The book explores, in all its painful ramifications, the pursuit and loss of erotic happiness.<p><BR>Among the variety of places that comprise this world of sensual possibilities are the mountaintop resort hotel where David Kepesh spends his boyhood, the college in upstate New York where he begins life as a passionate man by describing himself to coeds he hopes to seduce with Lord Byron's dictum, "studious by day, dissolute by night"; a...</BR></p></p></p>