Customer Reviews

Dying Animal

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(24)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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.

A noteworthy feature of contemporary American fiction was the resurgence of Philip Roth. Eight marvellous books in a row. His trio of experimental novels: The Counterlife (that gives post modernism a good name); Deception; and Operation Shylock; the intensely moving biography, Patrimony; for this reader the finest novel of the 1990s, Sabbath's Theater, a nihilistic masterpiece of sex, death and despair; and the new Zuckerman trilogy dissecting post war America, American Pastoral; I Married a Communist; and The Human Stain. Could this great run continue? Sadly, not.

The Dying Animal is a disappointment. Written in a first person narrative it reintroduces David Kepesh, a Professor of English. Kepesh is the man that transformed into a breast in Roth's Kafkan fable, The Breast; and detailing the sexual life of a literary academic in Professor of Desire. Kepesh is a creation of the 1960s, and this new novella indicates that kepesh has not progressed very far. In order to beat off notions of his mortality Kepesh seduces students (although in a concession to the passage of time, Kepesh no longer seduces them when students, having the decency to wait until they pass through his class). This brings a whole new meaning to the concept in modenr education of the Staff-Student Liaison Committee.

In his monologue, addressed to a listener revealed only in the final paragraphs, Kepesh remembers various lovers concentrating on Consuela, a Cuban emigree. The intense relationship between the two, and Consuela's subsequent absence and the effect on Kepesh, forms the crux of the novel.

The novella is very readable. Roth remains a wonderful stylist. But, as he has been subject to on previous occasions Roth is criticised for pronography. This novella is not in my view pornographic. Certainly there are passages that are explicit, but far more pornographic is Kepesh's relationship with Birgitta in The Professor of Desire - Birgitta, like The Monkey in Portnoy's Complaint, being a girl that would do anything. The abusive nature of that relationship is pornographic. The relationships here are not like that (although the ostensible power imbalance inherent in sexual relationships in some recent Roth novels remains).

While sex plays a role in the novella it is not its main focus. Kepesh is worried about growing old, worried about death. One Scottish poet, Norman MacCaig, said the thing that upsetted him most about growing old was that all his friends were dying. Ditto, for Kepesh, and so Roth - as he did in The Conterlife and Sabbath's Theater and The Human Stain, wrestles with death. Sexual activity is used as a means of keeping mortality at bay. Love is not what keeps Kepesh going, sex is. This not only underpins the septugenarian Kepesh's life, but also the lives of his friends, even to the death bed. Kepesh's stroke-ridden friend, a serial adulterer, gropes his wife in his last concerted physical act.

One interesting theme developed in the novella is the relationship between Kepesh and his son (another of these father/son relationships beloved by Roth's writing - see the first Zuckerman trilogy - and his reading - such as his praise of John le Carre's A perfect spy). The son's stumbling path into adultery (based on love) acts as a neat counterpoint to Kepesh's serial philandering.

I think this book merits discussion, much thought. Roth is a serious writer after all. But, why the relatively low rating? For me, there are two principal reasons. This novella simply revisists themes he has explored before, in more depth, with more rounded characters. Kepesh's trials here mirror those of Mickey Sabbath in Sabbath's Theater. Roth is not giving us anything new here. The second reason relates to the ending. The return of a character, and their motivation for returning to visit an old man is absurd and lacking credibility. The absurdity of the final pages serves to undercut the power of some that has gone before.

If you enjoyed this novella try Sabbath's Theater, a funnier, angrier, darker take on similar themes.

Closer to three-and-a-half stars. An amazing thing happened to Philip Roth in the 1990s. While his contemporaries--Updike, Styron and Mailer--were either hibernating or spinning their wheels, Roth was reinventing himself. His novels of the '80s were concerned primarily with writing--that is, the writer as narrator, and about sex; and though at least one of the novels ("The Counterlife") was very fine, Roth's books seemed rather narrow in scope. But beginning with his memoir "Patrimony" in '91 and continuing on, Roth majorly reinvented his fiction. His fictional landscapes have expanded. He has moved outside the "writing about writing" trap so many highbrow authors fall into, and has written about the world around him. His prose is as indignant, as over-the-top (sometimes), as funny as ever--but his literary scope is much wider. Surely this is why his latest novels have gained a wide readership and all of America's major literary awards.

"The Dying Animal", at first glance, seems a throwback to the Roth of the '80s. It's a book about sex, no question. The author is an elderly man with a fondness for young women (who somehow find him irresistible) and a seemingly inexhaustible sexual appetite. All of it seems recycled (and, given the narrator's age, unbelievable), until one realizes that Roth is treating these themes in a very different way. The deep sadness that runs through this novel is relatively new to Roth's writing and appears to have originated in his '91 memoir, "Patrimony." I know it's dangerous to make inferences about authors given their written product (Zuckerman taught us that, if nothing else!), but Roth is not a young man anymore and his latest novels, "The Dying Animal" among them, portray older men coming to grips with their mortality and trying to make sense of the lives they have led and the world around them. That is what David Kepesh is doing here, though he fights with all his might not to do it. He wants to continue living the life of a sexual miscreant, but the mind and body (and, dare one say it? the heart), won't let him. He's becoming, ever so gradually, the kindly, harmless old man he never wanted to be. Of course, he resists it vigorously--and this is where Roth's impassioned, angry prose works beautifully--but faced with death and decay everywhere, he knows it's a losing battle.

Coming off the high of his Americana trilogy (and the literary peak of "The Human Stain"), this book may seem slight in size and scope, and it is. It may not be one of Roth's very best, but it's very good nonetheless, and every bit worth a read. It is most definitely NOT a recycling of his old books. (In fact, a warning is in order: if you've read "The Professor of Desire" already, forget everything you knew about David Kepesh, because the character's history has changed markedly in this novel.)

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-mortifying effort at feeling morally superior to others. However, part of Roth's genius as a novelist is that he does not succumb to the temptation to force his characters to toe an ideological line. In this novel (again, as in life), reality is always at least a little bit in friction with our philosophy. So, Kepesh finds himself wondering aloud, "I don't even know after a while what I'm desperate for. ... Her soul? Her youth? Her simple mind? Maybe it's worse than that -- maybe now that I'm nearing death, I also long secretly not to be free" (p. 106).

This is a Platonic view of love. (Like Kepesh, I apologize for my academic tone, but "I'm a teacher -- didacticism is my destiny" [p. 112].) For Plato, love is painful, love destroys who we were -- but it is also the only thing that can make us whole, and can make us greater than we once were.

So, on the last page of the story (don't worry -- I won't reveal details), Kepesh is faced with an existential choice: is freedom more important than anything, and worth abandoning or destroying anything that interferes with it (as Nietzsche thought)? Or is the pain of love a guide to where we must go, to become complete (as Plato said)?

This is "the eternal problem of attachment" (p. 105), and the central theme of this wonderful book.

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!"

As with all (or recent) Philip Roth novels, this struggles somewhat to avoid identification. It is like a beast caught within a sack half its size. You try to hold it - you want to keep it within the sack after all - but you quickly realise that whatever you do - however much you slam the sack against a wall or attempt to keep your hands together around the lip of the bag - sooner or later, the thing in the bag will get out and then where will you be?

The beast metaphor is sort of apposite too. In the opening maybe thirty pages, the beast is a snake. It comes as something of a shock after the last three novels (the collossal genius of "American Pastoral", "I married a Communist" and "The Human Stain"), all voiced by the (now) retiring Nathan Zuckerman, to hear David Kepesh. Salty snake-like David Kepesh. The first thirty pages (at least) slip round you in a way that makes you shudder. The words are oily. Naked with a dirty kind of honesty, sexual flagrancy. You don't like David Kepesh. He is a vulgar erudite snake. He is a sexual predator. He is a kind of celebrity (in the way that, say Frasier Crane is a celebrity), regularly appearing on a Sunday morning culture programme on the TV. We know David Kepesh. We have met him before, in "The Breast" and "The Professor of Desire".

And yet and yet.

He has an affair (only the latest in a long line but different and dictinct for all that) with a young student Consuela Castillo, a girl who does not understand art (who questions her relationship to Picasso, for example, in a way that suggests she puts too much thought into what she perceives, and how she is perceived). Unlike his countless previous conquests, though, Consuela unseats Kepesh and leaves him floundering. He is riven with jealousy. He wants to possess her in a way she has never been possessed before. He dissects the position of dominance within their relationship: yes, he is dominant, because he is 62 years old and knows more than her, but, at the same time, she is dominant because she is young and beautiful: the relationship is described by Roth as a "braid", and the braid - when mentioned - remains with you throughout the first reading.

To combat this reliance, he takes up with another former student, a student he had an affair with years before who he meets by accident one day. Kepesh also ruminates upon his relationship with the son that hates him and blames him for the way that life has turned out.

Still, the affair with Consuela continues, only to be abandoned over something and nothing. Kepesh admits that it takes him three years to get over her. Three years to get out of the desperate need for her, the reliance upon the habit of her. There is a sense of Kepesh, within the pages of this short book, as a man keenly aware of loneliness, wanting company every second of his life, whilst at the same time desperate to be free of any kind of emotional shackles. David Kepesh is a twenty five year old (not wanting to settle down, not wanting to be lonely) in the body of a seventy year old.

What is important - and what slips within your reading alongside the braid of dominance - is the title. As with "The Human Stain" the title offers as much in the way of a challenge as the actual book. It's called "The Dying Animal" after all. Just who is the dying animal? The most obvious choice would be Consuela, who phones Kepesh on New Year's Eve, 1999 (over three years after the end of their affair) to tell him that she may be dying. At the same time, however, the animal is Kepesh, giving into that braid of dominance once more. You can extrapolate further: the dying animal is sexuality, a certain kind of sexuality, a certain kind of masculinity. All these readings braid together, twisting and turning with the reality of smoke or fog.

As ever, it is a compelling ride. As ever, even in a short book, you can't help but feel cowed by the enormity of a person's talent. As ever, there are parts of the book that appal you - but that feeling, that being appalled, is part of what makes reading Roth novels so exhilerating. As ever, the specific becomes magnified. As ever, you can only read and re-read and over-read and over-complicate, and succeed in complicating and confusing the story. As ever, this is a story. To be enjoyed and shocked by. To be exhilerated by. As ever, once finished, you can but look to what comes next.

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"

David Kepesh is the aging, Porsche-driving professor who alternately brags or obsesses over his conquest of a beautiful 24 year-old Cuban-American student. "Everybody's defenseless against something," David declares, "and [female beauty] that's it for me."

Consuela, his conquest, is likened to Modigliani's painting, "Reclining Nude." "The accessible dream girl. One long undulating line, she lies there awaiting you, still as death."

Kepesh critiques a previous girlfriend and we notice his obsession with age too. "Still beautiful...though beneath the pale gray eyes the biggish sockets were now papery and worn."

The professor has a resentful forty-two-year-old grown son, Kenny, as well. He was traumatized at age 8 when his parents divorced. In college Kenny wrote his thesis paper based on his hatred of his father. "A depraved sensualist. A solitary old lecher."

"Put him anywhere near me and the wound begins to hemorrhage," the elder Kepesh reflects. This ceaseless emotional attack came before Kenny graduated and took up his profession as an art conservator. "Before he cauterized the wound by turning himself into a prig." Ironically, the professor's son now finds himself caught up in his own affair and troubled marriage, frequently spending the night at Dad's pad.

David Kepesh blames the 1960's for his divorce. Never mind that Kepesh is just another alter ego for Philip Roth, whose unrestrained 60's novel, "Portnoy's Complaint," fueled the sexual revolution. The "real" weapons of that generation are nailed however. Music, marijuana, and the Pill. "For them there was an arsenal of all-out anti-inhibitors."

But the sexual rebellion had more casualties. Rejected mid-meal by her date one evening, an ex-student, Elena, visits her favorite college teacher and comes unglued. "Do you think it's supposed to be like this when you're as successful as I am? Life baffles you and you become a very self-protective person and just say the hell with it." The men, Professor Kepesh analyzes, come in five types: narcissistic, humorless and crude; great-looking and ruthlessly unfaithful; emasculated; impotent or dumb.

Is the thinking man's Hugh Hefner getting a little unhip? Maybe not. He tells teary-eyed Elena about a male friend who detested the trap his marriage had become. He finally divorces, and then, at loose ends, marries again, only to begin more affairs. "Deferring, deferring, deferring? Appeasing, appeasing, appeasing: Every other day dreaming of leaving? No, it's not a dignified way to be a man. Or, I told Elena, to be a woman."

David Kepesh is no longer the young, surrealist dreamer who narrated Roth's 1970's novella, "The Breast." In that absurdist fiction Kepesh found himself hopelessly imprisoned by his desires. 29 years later the professor still struggles, but for the most part he's contrived a system, or at least a defense, for his unfettered emotional life.

Continuing the art metaphor he portrays Consuela as if she were a cubist canvas painted by a raging Picasso. She's a tempting collage of erogenous parts until, in a final whirling striptease, she is undone by a grotesque joke. A joke grisly enough to make us perhaps choose to opt out of "The Dying Animal." But Kepesh persuades us to hang in there, making us unwitting legatees to the thoughts of this peculiar intellectual. Check to see if you're not part of the will.

The Dying Animal isn't really a novel as we have come to expect it, there is no plot to speak of, barely any dialog, and it's 156 pages. What it is is an exploration on the nature of life and death, it's about growing old in a country obsessed with the young. The narrator of this monologue is David Kepesh, a 70ish professor reflecting on an affair he had with one of his much younger students several years earlier. Something has happened, which we discover towards the end of the work, which has put him in a particularly pensive and reflective mood. He talks on about his affair and other events in his life. He's not a particularly likeable person, some would consider what he does despicable and sexist, yet what he has to say is compelling. I don't think I could have taken 500 pages of the Dying Animal, but 156 seems about right. What Kepesh has to say is thoughtful and thought-provoking, and the point of his monologue becomes clear as the work draws to a close. The Dying Animal clearly isn't for the faint of heart, the easily offended. If you can handle a thought-provoking exposition with apologies to no one, give this one a try.