The Dying Animal

David Kepesh is white-haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a New York college, when he meets Consuela Castillo, a decorous, well-mannered student of twenty-four, the daughter of wealthy Cuban exiles, who promptly puts his life into erotic disorder.

Since the sexual revolution of the 1960s freed him from his wife and child, Kepesh has experimented with living what he calls an emancipated manhood, beyond the reach of family or a mate. Over the years he has refined that exuberant decade of protest and license into an orderly life in which he is both unimpeded in the world of eros and studiously devoted to his aesthetic pursuits. But the youth and beauty of Consuela, a masterpiece of volupte, undo him completely. His worldliness, his confidence, his reason desert him, and a maddening sexual possessiveness transports him to the depths of deforming jealousy. The carefree erotic adventure with which he began evolves, over eight years, into a poignant, tragic story of love and loss.

What is astonishing is how much of America's post-sixties sexual landscape is encompassed in The Dying Animal. Once again, with unmatched facility, Philip Roth entangles the fate of his characters with the social forces that shape our daily lives. And there is no character who can tell us more about the way we live with desire than David Kepesh, whose previous incarnations as a sexual being were chronicled by Roth in The Breast and The Professor of Desire.

A work of passionate immediacy, The Dying Animal is intellectually bold, forcefully candid, wholly of our time, and utterly without precedent.

"The recent creative surge that has produced some of Roth's best fiction continues with this intense short novel narrated by David Kepesh (protagonist also of The Breast and The Professor of Desire), who's a more highly eroticized counterpart of Roth's other serial alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman" Kirkus Review

"Eros and mortality are the central themes of Roth's frank, unsparing and curious new novella. It's curious not only because of its short form (new for Roth), but because he seems to have assumed the mantle of Saul Bellow, writing pages of essay-like exposition on contemporary social phenomena and advancing the narrative through introspection rather than dialogue....The novella is as brilliantly written, line by line, as any book in Roth's oeuvre, and it's bound to be talked about with gusto." Publishers Weekly

"...insidiously disturbing and completely irresistable...All sympathetic readers will find themselves wondering: Is Philip Roth now our finest living novelist?" The Washington Post

"Powerful...Roth's narrator newly illuminates the American body, the American soul, the life of loving and the love of life that has always been so all-consuming in his fiction." The Chicago Tribune

"In the hard, driving, unsentimental sentences, and with superb dialogue...Roth remained true to his youthful vision" Atlantic Monthly

"(a) gleefully incendiary tale...whose eloquence and rage ultimately persuade us that (we)...bear the grace and the misfortune of belonging to a deeply flawed, tragically vulnerable, unavoidably mortal species." Elle

"The third Roth novel to star David Kepesh (title character of The Breast back in 1972) brings an old man's perspective to the characteristic needy, argumentative voice of Roth's heroes without cracking the solipsism and self-regard." The New York Times Book Review, Summer Reading 2001 selection

"Our societal belief that past a certain age lust is unseemly is a means of protecting ourselves from an inconvenient truth: Desire persists even beyond the body's ability to meet its physical demands. Yet the lust that figures in so many of Philip Roth's novels was unseemly to his detractors long before Roth began to near age 70, the age of David Kepesh, the protagonist of The Breast, The Professor of Desire and the new The Dying Animal.
Throughout his career, Roth has refused to prettify lust, refused to deny the desire to possess and even to degrade that, he has insisted, cannot be separated from the male sexual psyche. In The Dying Animal, Kepesh, who is recalling an affair that began with his beautiful 24-year-old student Consuela when he was 62..." Charles Taylor, Salon.com (read Salon.com's entire review)

PHILIP ROTH received the 1960 National Book Award in fiction for Goodbye, Columbus. He has twice received the National Book Critics Circle Award? — in 1987 for the novel The Counterlife and in 1992 for Patrimony. Operation Shylock won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was chosen by Time magazine as the best American novel of 1993. In 1995, Roth's Sabbath's Theater received the National Book Award in fiction. In 1998, he received the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral and was a White House recipient of the National Medal of Arts. His other books include the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound; the novels Letting Go, My life as a Man, and The Professor of Desire; and the political satire Our Gang.