With these words America's most unflaggingly energetic and morally serious novelist launches perhaps his fiercest book. The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent cultural critic and star lecturer at a New York college - as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practise of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete's critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.