The Dying Animal

Philip Roth is my favorite author, but this slim volume slipped by me when it was released about five years ago. It returns his character David Kepesh, the protagonist of two previous works: The Breast, and The Professor of Desire.

Kepesh is now seventy, a TV intellectual and part-time teacher, and over the years has had a string of affairs with his students. One in particular, a Cuban-American named Consuelo Castillo, haunts him. Her breasts, in particular. Since Kepesh was once in a book by Roth where he turns, Gregor Samsa-like, into a large breast, perhaps this is not surprising.

Literature is full of work about college professors sleeping with students, particularly middle-aged or older men with girls. This is pretty distasteful and somewhat unbelievable. Would a guy in his sixties, even if he was on TV, managed to bag a female student each and every semester? We certainly aren't meant to admire Kepesh--he's brutally blunt about what he's up to: "No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex. It's a very risky game. A man wouldn't have two-thirds of the problems he has if he didn't venture off to get fucked. It's sex that disorders our normally orderly lives. I know this as well as anyone."

Kepesh is a particularly vivid cad. There's a scene in which he lies to an older lover who has found the younger woman's bloody tampon in his garbage can. He's like one of those scary individuals who can beat a lie detector test. He also has a turbulent relationship with his son, and in one section tries to convince him not to marry his pregnant girlfriend, in a bizarre reversal of the usual father-son "responsibility" talks.

As often with Roth, there is some pretty frank sexual discussion, and some heavenly writing. In the long run, though, Kepesh was so vile it was hard to not want to see him thrashed, and the ending, which again involves Consuela's breasts, was teetering on the completely ludicrous.

Roth, in the novels he has written in the past few years, is clearly grappling with issues of mortality (the title, by the way, is a line from Yeats). In this book the dying animal may just be the libido itself, or the end of a pursuit of youth by a man who gained it from younger women.