The Dying Animal

Roth fans, students of serious literature, and those interested in a glimpse into the aging male psyche should truly enjoy this gem of a book. Roth proves his stature as one of America's greatest living writers by, in the mere span of roughly 150 large-type pages, offering insights into subjects such as man's intellectual nature versus man's sexual nature, Puritanism, academia and political correctness, the Sixties, marriage and family, mortality, and the randomness of fate. One could go on and on describing the many attributes of this book, but in the spirit of Roth's pithiness, I will just say: "read it!"

This is a review of _The Dying Animal_ by Philip Roth (in the Vintage Books paperback edition).A friend recommended this novella to me, and I'm very glad she did. It really isn't going too far to describe it (as one published review did) as a "masterpiece."The narrator is "David Kepesh," a sexagenarian college professor and minor celebrity intellectual (he has a PBS show) who routinely sleeps with selected female students from his advanced seminar (wisely waiting until after the grades have been turned in -- although nowadays only a "David Kepesh" or a Philip Roth could get away with even this). Kepesh describes (to an unidentified interlocutor, who remains silent until the book's final page) the trajectory of his affair with a Cuban-American student, Consuela Castillo. Along the way, there are interesting (and relevant to the story) digressions on America's sexual revolution of the 60's and 70's, the colonial-era sexual and religious radical Thomas Morton, the surreal nature of the Y2K celebrations, etc.This is one of those lovely books that works on many different levels. First, it is a funny book. Those with delicate sensibilities will be offended by some of the humor, but it's hard not to laugh. This is also (unsurprisingly for a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist) a well written book: "That body is still new to her, she's still trying it out, thinking it through, a bit like a kid walking the streets with a loaded gun and deciding whether he's packing it to protect himself or to begin a life of crime" (p. 4).But what most engaged me was how Roth uses the novel to explore some of the thorny issues that surround human sexuality. Let's face it: sex is complicated. Power is part of what complicates it. And the power is inescapable: "You're going to rule out dominance? You're going to rule out yielding? The dominating is the flint, it strikes the spark, it sets it going" (p. 20). We begin the novel thinking that the professor has the position of power in this relationship. (Campus sexual harassment rules seem to take this for granted.) But it soon becomes clear that Kepesh is the more infatuated one. (Or is he? For in this novel, as in real life, everything is complex and uncertain.)Sex is further complicated by marriage, for which Kepesh has harsh words: "Look, heterosexual men going into marriage are like priests going into the Church: they take the vow of chastity, only seemingly without knowing it until three, four, five years down the line" (p. 67). Kepesh's response to this discovery in his own case was to divorce his wife. His son never forgave him for this, and to prove that he is a better man than his father, he has stayed in an unhappy marraige rather than walk out. The general philosophical perspective of the book is (in a very broad sense) Nietzschean. The narrator is an advocate of freeing oneself from convention and sentimental attachment. His son is a prime example of someone whose "morality" is simply a self-

This is a work that is needle-sharp and poignant - and almost frightening in places. I read it in one sitting and was deeply moved. There is great tenderness and an aching acceptance of people and their confusions and inevitable weaknesses (and power) in it. Its several digressions (from its loose plot) are trenchant and valuable - and come as something of a pleasant surprise. As in so many of Roth's books several erotic themes predominate: they are Roth's currency, and his way into his psyche, and into the hearts and minds of his interesting characters. (For example, Roth never confuses sex with food.) In this layered story Roth takes on sickness, aging, and impending death. He intimately explores people who refuse to go quietly, who rail and protest and want to hang on to life and all of its exquisite pleasures - which for Roth, are frequently erotic. Rothian eros is so much more than sexual acts, but rather is so often at the heart of the matter, and the vantage point from which his readers might begin to understand the world. A great book that is thoroughly worth reading.

This is not a sex book. It is an essay on "letting go" and on facing death. Sex is a metaphor for life; as it has always been for Roth. Perhaps, if I were younger, I may have missed the point. David's battle with depression is the war we all fight as seniors. And Roth's never ending struggle with the concept of committment has been an recurring theme throughout his career. It is true that he comes back to these themes many times, but he does so with great skill and creative talent. A few of his books have, in my opinion, been over the top, but this one is a strong "thumbs up"

It's useful to think of "The Dying Animal" as a coda to Roth's magnificent trilogy of books on post-war America--"American Pastoral", "I Married a Communist", and "The Human Stain." It functions much the same way as "The Prague Orgy" did as that novella summed up his earlier "Zuckerman Bound" trilogy. The themes of the earlier books are cast in unexpected new ways that show even more light. The protagonist of this new book is Kepesh, not Zuckerman, but the preoccupations of this book are the same as the American trilogy--how do you reinvent yourself like a good American who can supposedly just shuck off the past; what is the price you pay for that spiritual reformation (or deformation.) This David Kepesh's history is somewhat altered from the Kepesh of "The Breast" and "The Professor of Desire"; he now has a middle-aged son who hates him and one somewhat shadowy ex-wife who he abandoned during the sexual upheaval of the 60's. Otherwise he remains the same; a hedonistic moralist intoxicated by female beauty (especially breasts: he loves a voluptuary Modigliani painting of a female nude that appears on the jacket of this novel.) In his sixties he begins an affair with Consuela, a decorous young Cuban-American woman who presses all the right buttons for the aging professor. Intertwined with the story is a marvelous debate on the meaning of the cultural revolution of the '60's and '70's. Kepesh is predictably king-hell for freedom, but his son is a constant unwelcome reminder of the damage done. One again as in "Operation Shylock" and the American trilogy Roth brilliantly shows a man tearing himself in two trying to "break on through to the other side", to a life without history and consequences. Once again Roth shows us that he can write an English sentence better than anyone else. Again we get his excruciating, tragic, comic self-indictment. For at the end it turns out that Consuela needs Kepesh in a most desparate, life-or-death sense and Kepesh is forced to confront the fact of her not as just a breast, not as his somewhat dim little girlfriend (as he thoughtlessly sees her) but as a human being in terrible trouble. The final pages as as harrowing as anything Roth has written. This book, by the greatest living American writer, is required reading for lovers of American fiction.