The Professor of DesireBy: Philip Roth As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself as 'a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes' an identity that will cling to him for a lifetime. As Philip Roth follows Kapesh from the domesticity of childhood out into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a mnage trois in London to the depths of loneliness in New York, Kapesh confronts the central dilemma of pleasure: how to make a truce between dignity and desire;