I read Philip Roth's first few books then missed a couple of decades. Upon joining an online discussion group I read this book and find he has become just another old goat looking for young poon. Is he vying for that rascal Henry Miller`s mantle as Dirty Old Man of American Letters? I know that art can be about anything but an essay on the changes in society over the last forty years would have sufficed. Like many Woody Allen fans I prefer the older, funnier work.
Roth is a fine writer and unlike some best selling authors he does have a lot to say. I just could not get past the story of a twenty year old entering into a liaison with a senior citizen. As young coeds in the sixties, my friends and I would never entertain such thoughts about even the youngest instructors. "He must be at least thirty and probably married." We had plenty of callow frat boys buzzing around who didn't know anything about anything and it suited us just fine.
Attending college in Canada, the Vietnam War did not really affect us except for the occasional kid with a Yank accent panhandling on the street. Draft dodgers. We kept our distance because American boys had a reputation for being fast..... By the seventies I was safely married sat on the sidelines during the devolution of the freedom movement into the disco era. That generation jettisoned the ideology and kept the drugs. A writer of Roth's stature would have no end of groupies willing to sit at his feet or do anything else he wanted. It was amusing when he invoked the US Constitution to bolster his case for doing exactly as he pleased. Rogering as an Inalienable Right.
His alter ego in the book is not an altogether hopeless case. Anyone as erudite and cultured as David Kepesh cannot be all bad. I found it endearing that he persisted with his piano playing even though he kept hitting wrong notes. He was truly attached to his friend George and went out of his way to make his last days meaningful even though it was an exercise in futility. We are all wary of being smothered by the very people from whom we seek comfort. Intimacy is fraught with danger. But being alone has pitfalls as well as pleasures.
Having a peek beneath David's detached exterior it gives the reader hope that he will extend himself to the ailing Consuela. The affair that caused him to regress into adolescent jealousy and possessiveness may enable him to finally grow up. He only has to take the opportunity to redeem himself.
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