fascinating study | The Dying Animal (Movie Tie-in Edition/Elegy) (Vintage International)

The Dying Animal: Roth's Cuban Mistress Crisis. | The Dying Animal (Movie Tie-in Edition/Elegy) (Vintage International) | Philip Roth

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	• The Dying Animal (Movie Tie-in Edition/Elegy) (Vintage International) Philip Roth Vintage, 2008 - 176 pages average customer review:based on 62 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fitting continuation of Professor of Desire

This brief novel is a fine continuation of the David Kepesh saga. An aging man now, Professor Kepesh begins an ill-advised love affair with an inappropriately young, Latin American student. Kepesh puts it, having an affair with someone younger doesn't make you feel young, it makes you feel older - but at least you're not sitting on the sidelines. A meditation on desire and loss.

fascinating study

At first glance, this appeared to me a misogynistic and annoying novella, but as it progressed, I found myself caught up in what became an intelligent and wonderfully insightful work about sexuality and aging and much more in between. Yes, it's a little full of itself, but then again, this is Philip Roth. Very satisfying, if unnerving at points.

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The Dying Animal: Roth's Cuban Mistress Crisis.

Best known for Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, American Pastoral, Philip Roth's introspective 2001 novella, The Dying Animal, tells the poignant story of Jewish intellectual, David Kepesh, a celebrated literature professor, who is inacapable of understanding the meaning of emotional commitment. The Dying Animal is the third in a trilogy of Kepesh novels; the preceding two novels are The Breast (1972) and The Professor of Desire (1977).

The Dying Animal is a profound meditation on life, love, loss, and death told in Philip Roth's characteristic style. Kepesh was a promiscuous professor at New York College with an obsession for women's breasts. He is a womanizer who worships women. He abandoned his family to pursue his sexual desires without emotional entanglements. Now in his 70s, he remains vexed by a purely sexual relationship he had at age 62 with a voluptuous, 24-year-old Cuban student, Consuela Castillo, knowing at the time that this relationship could indeed be his last. What makes this novel so poignant is that eight years after their sexual liason, Consuela informs Kepesh she has breast cancer, transforming this story from a tale of intense eros into a deeper lesson on mortality. Roth's novel was recently adapted into a 2008 film, Elegy, starring Ben Kingsley as David Kepesh and Penélope Cruz as Consuela Castillo. The Dying Animal attests to Philip Roth's rare genius as a writer. Highly recommended.

G. Merritt

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Average Philip Roth tale

The Dying Animal is not Philip Roth's best book, but it's not his worst either. For more go to http://www.youtube.com/Bobsbooks

A history of 20th-century sexual America

I think you have two choices when reading this book: be utterly horrified, or take it as a succinct bit of honesty about sex. Which you choose will depend, in all likelihood, on whether you're a woman or a man. Many women will see it as rank misogyny. I don't begrudge them that belief. I happen to think, on the contrary, that it is an absolute masterpiece. It does for the sexual revolution what Roth's American trilogy -- American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain -- did for the rest of mid-to-late-twentieth-century American history: condense it down and focus its agonies on one man.

Here the representative for 20th-century America is David Kapesh. Others will have met him in Roth's earlier novels, The Professor of Desire and The Breast; I've not read those, so I can't comment. In The Dying Animal, we meet Kapesh in his early seventies, a famous cultural critic who appears on public television every week, book in hand, white mane flowing and (one presumes) turtleneck up to his chin. He is an enthusiastic participant in the sexual revolution. It seems as though every semester he picks one new student to seduce after classes are over -- for sex, nothing more. This is just a meeting of flesh and flesh: everyone is aware of the game that everyone else is playing.

This contract alone leads into the book's heart, which is a lecture on and a demonstration of what sex used to mean for someone of Kapesh's generation, what it means now, what changed, and how much we've forgotten about the revolution. In Kapesh's youth, "heavy petting" was a stage one got to after endless courtship; anything more would have horrified his parents, had they known. Without going into detail (this is a family publication, after all), we take substantially more contact for granted. As Kapesh notes, today's youth believe that absolute sexual freedom arrived along with the Declaration of Independence; we think it's a fundamental human right, as natural as the water we drink. Kapesh reminds us that in order to move from the era of heavy petting to this sexual anarchy, sexual anarchists had to set fire to a lot of taboos: like anything else that we take for granted, today's casual lifestyle was yesterday's struggle.

During that struggle, Kapesh was an awestruck participant. He wasn't young enough to take the struggle in stride and accept it as part of his being; he was a mature man, already a married college professor, who saw the revolution for what it was and decided to dive right in. He lost a wife and child during the battle, but he knew what he was getting into and what he'd be giving up.

When he gave it up, a lot of what passed for sexual certainty in the society was revealed to be hollow convention. Get married so that he could have unsatisfying but officially sanctioned sex with his wife, meanwhile yearning for the acres of supple flesh that attended his classes every semester; pretend that the omnivorous male inside could be locked away inside a socially respectable façade.

His son never forgives him. To prove that he's so much more decent and moral than his father, he gets his girlfriend pregnant and promptly marries her. Tell her to get an abortion, Kapesh tells him. If she refuses, that's not your problem -- the sexual revolution made her a freestanding sexual being and it did the same to you. The son marries her anyway. When he goes on to have an affair a few children later, he has to endow that affair with social respectability: the girl is sweet and loving and intelligent and writes poetry and has wonderful parents. Kapesh can only stare with scorn: you're trying to camouflage a transaction involving meat. Why pretend that you are anything other than you are? Why lacquer sex with the social respectability that my generation so feverishly cast off?

The son is devastated, but keeps returning to his father, whom he loathes. He needs to parade his respectability before his enemy, but at some level he probably also respects the choice that his father made. In this conflict between father and son, we have three generations of American sexual understanding: the father as a youth (sexual expectation: years of courtship followed by wedding followed by sex), father as grown man (the sexual revolution presents a world of limitless, dangerous possibility), and son as a grown man (trying to reassemble some sexual order after a generation of anarchy).

Into Kapesh's life comes Consuela, a Cuban student born into the anarchy, but standing outside of it. She is beautiful and (it's important to the story) buxom, but she's kept aloof from the many men who presumably desired her. She can take or leave Kapesh, and this fact drives him crazy. For once he needs control -- needs to regain the order that he enthusiastically disposed of; to know that he can't control her, and that some other man can take her away, sends him into spasms of jealousy. In one rather graphic scene, he throws away all his self-control and lets the anarchy destroy him. Consuela is the agent of his destruction, but stands hautily by while it happens.

All this in not much more than 100 large-print pages. It is the most brutally honest book about sex you will probably ever read. It is an unqualified masterpiece.

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David Kepesh is 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 practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete's critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.

When he becomes involved with Consuela Castillo, the humblingly beautiful daughter of Cuban exiles, Kepesh finds himself dragged helplessly, bitterly, furiously into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling this descent, Philip Roth performs a breathtaking set of variations on the themes of eros and mortality, license and repression, selfishness and sacrifice.

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