Our narrator, David Alan Kepesh, is a 38-year-old hypochondriac and professor of literature whose parents ran a hotel in the Catskills when he was a kid; he has a failed marriage behind him, but is in the third or fourth year of a relatively stable and satisfying relationship with a twenty-something woman, Claire Ovington. He relates to us an amazing, astounding, fantastic phenomenon which began with a radical increase in the sensitivity of his penis and a corresponding renaissance of his physical desire for Claire and ability to enjoy sexual intercourse. After a few weeks of this surprising and welcome change in his sex life, he noticed a discoloration around his penis. Kepesh scheduled a visit to his doctor, but before his appointment came he underwent an unbelievable, and monstrously painful, transformation. He woke up in a hospital, blind, with no arms or legs, shrieking and sobbing in horror and misery for days, thinking he had been in a boiler explosion--in fact, due to a bizarre hormonal event, he had been transformed into a six-foot-long bag of flesh, his radically altered penis at one end--he is a huge womanly breast.
Roth doesn't present this scenario as an absurd farce, but rather like a serious science fiction horror story, describing the biological realities of this transformation (e. g., how he can still hear and talk and breathe without a proper mouth, nose or ears), the efforts of the medical community to keep him alive (Kepesh is fed intravenously, and tubes carry away his wastes) and, most importantly, Kepesh's psychological responses to this phenomenon as well as the reactions of his parents, colleagues, and Claire, his loyal girlfriend. Roth succeeds in making all this pretty disturbing.
I think it is fair to say that, once the initial background has been laid out, the novella chronicles three distinct periods in Kepesh's life as a breast, each characterized by a different tack he takes in his response to his unique and unprecedented predicament. Early on, he tries to drown his sorrows in sensual pleasure. He can't read, he can't walk around, he can't taste or smell, but he can experience sexual pleasure when somebody stimulates his nipple. And, since he is incapable of orgasm, he could, theoretically, experience sexual pleasure endlessly. Our narrator becomes obsessed with the idea of having women stroke and squeeze the nipple that his penis has become, or even have intercourse with it as if it was still a penis, but is unable to get much cooperation from the small number of women who enter his hospital room--he strives desperately, beyond all limits of decorum and decency, to persuade the nurse who gives him his daily sponge bath to satisfy his desires, without success. Long-suffering Claire agrees to stimulate the nipple with her hand and mouth, but for only brief periods. (Perhaps significantly, Claire was always resistant to having anal sex with Kepesh, or to letting him ejaculate into her mouth.) Kepesh, in what he describes as a "battle," achieves some control over this obsession, with the help of his doctors, who provide anesthetizing drugs and assign him a male nurse--Kepesh can't get excited over the idea of a man touching him.
Kepesh's final tack is something of a reversion to form and an abandonment of any pretensions to high values or adult responsibility. (Maybe we should see Kepesh's transformation as not just from whole man to partial female, but from not quite successful adult to helpless selfish baby.) Kepesh begins, perhaps only rhetorically, to plan to use his unique malady to become famous and rich, which will attract to him women who will do for him the things Claire and the female nurse he tried to bribe have refused to do. This book, perhaps, is the first blow in his campaign to become a wealthy celebrity, and the story ends without resolution, though it seems doubtful Kepesh will achieve his wild dreams of escaping the hospital, getting rich through public performances and attracting legions of groupies (he suggests that if the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Charles Manson can do it, he can as well) and enjoying hours-long orgies in which five or six girls, including ones as young as twelve, stimulate him in every way he can imagine.
The Breast is a smooth and easy read, and (despite being the work of a celebrated mainstream literary author) is successful as an SF horror story about helplessness, loss of identity, and one's relationship with one's own body--are we at the mercy of our bodies' needs and limitations, our identities determined by our physical forms, or can we control and transcend the body and create a self with the force of our minds? So I recommend it.
But is there more? Philip Roth won a big stack of awards, awards like America's National Book Award, Britain's W. H. Smith Literary Award, and the Czech Republic's Franz Kafka Prize, so maybe we should be able to wring from this little book something deep. something about life or American culture or something. Well, let's squeeze until the pips squeak. Maybe Roth is writing about how men treat women as sex objects, and, in particular, how men (or maybe just American men or Jewish men?) fetishize women's breasts--after the way he has treated women like Claire and his ex-wife, perhaps this horrible transformation is a little bit of cosmic justice.
That feminist read is maybe what we expect to find when reading books in 2021, the era of "Me Too" and all that. Now I'll wrestle something out of the text that is a little more personal: a theme of debunking of academia and the intellectual elite--Kepesh and his colleagues at the university, and the entire academic enterprise, don't exactly come off as particularly serious or admirable in The Breast. Here I will take the liberty if connecting The Breast to one of the formative texts in my own life of reading--Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Now, Roth doesn't mention Proust in The Breast, but I will trot out our favorite Frenchman anyway. (Roth does mention Robert Musil, but I haven't read The Man Without Qualities so I can't do anything with that.) One of the many recurring themes in In Search of Lost Time, and one which struck a chord with me, is the idea that "the pleasures of the intellectual life," as well as friendship, are a sterile waste of time, that what is worthwhile is the pursuit of a variety of sensual, sexual experiences.* Of course, a more pervasive theme of Proust is that sexual relationships (at least heterosexual ones and those between gay men) are inherently frustrating and disappointing and generally asymmetrical and exploitative (Proust can leave you thinking that people and life are pretty crummy.) Well, I believe we can see these same sad themes in The Breast--take a look at this passage near the very end:
Well, I don't think I'm going to be able wring anything else out of The Breast. It's a worthwhile read; maybe I'll read 1977's The Professor of Desire, which, it appears, chronicles Kepesh's life, including his relationship with Claire Ovington, before the fantastical events of The Breast.
*See for example pp. 196-7 and pp. 664-6 of the paperback 1998 Modern Library Edition of Within a Budding Grove (that would be pp. 144-5 and 485-7 in the 2002 hardcover James Grieve trans, which is titled In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower.)
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