Admittedly, I only read this book because I found it on the free shelf of a community outreach center in Woodstock, New York — a town in which Philip Roth once lived!
Now that Roth has officially and publicly stopped writing, the reassessment of his novels has begun — which conveniently omits “The Breast,” another of his sexual jokes (published in 1972). “The Breast” is hardly even a novel; arguably it’s just a long short story. It’s about an English professor who is transformed, “between midnight and four A.M. on February 18, 1971” into a large breast. But where to go from there? Roth is disoriented, and thrashes around. It’s like 45 minutes of a Woody Allen movie that ends up (correctly) on the cutting room floor. On the other hand, it’s perfectly enjoyable (with an absolutely failed ending). Let’s listen to a little:
“So, with Dr. Klinger’s assistance, I undertook to try to extinguish, and if not to extinguish, at least (in the doctor’s favorite word) to TOLERATE the desire to insert my nipple into somebody’s vagina. But with all my will power — and that can be considerable when I marshal my forces — I was simply out of my depth once the washing got underway; and so in the end it was decided that in order to assist me in my heroic undertaking, my nipple and areola would be sprayed with a mild anesthetizing solution before Miss Clark started in preparing me for my day.”
“The Breast” is like a punchline without a joke. Erica Jong could have written a much better book about a woman becoming a penis.
I wonder if Roth was influenced by “I Am Joe’s Kidney,” in the Reader’s Digest, which first introduced anatomical surrealism to a wide American audience. (I must note parenthetically that my voice-activated computer wrote “Philip Roth” as “fill up broth.”)
