As a student in college, David Kepesh styles himself 'a rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes'. Little does he realise how prophetic this motto will be - or how damning. For as Philip Roth follows Kepesh from the domesticity of his childhood into the vast wilderness of erotic possibility, from a ménage à trois in London to the throes of loneliness in New York, he creates a supremely intelligent, affecting and often hilarious novel about the dilemma of pleasure: where we seek it; why we flee it; and how we struggle to make a truce between dignity and desire.