Rating: 
Summary: Written like a private diary
Review: I don't explain plots. Read any other review, you'll get a good idea what the book is about. I'll comment on Philip Roth's writing which is lean and mean. The way he has created David Kepesh reminds me of reading someone's private diary. While reading The Dying Animal I continually thought how simple and pleasurable and complicated life could be.I enjoyed The Dying Animal very much. Philip Roth does not disappoint. He could write about anything and make it good reading.
Rating: 
Summary: One Wishes Much More from Mr. Roth
Review: I felt the novel to be boring, a simple rehash of Mr. Roth's earlier work, and sloppily written at that. This is too bad, for Roth, at his best, is nothing less than a genius: his novella THE BENNY PODA YEARS was, for me, his finest work since SHYLOCK. But the present novel fails to achieve Roth's previous level of innovation.
Rating:
Summary: A Bore
Review: I felt this book to be boring, an inferior rehash of Roth's other work. In fact, the prose is sentimental and often downright poor.
Rating: 
Summary: A woman's point of View: David Kepesh; The Dying Animal
Review: I had read some amazing reviews on this book. Very high ratings from different sources. I felt compelled to read this book. Obligated.
I am a woman, and to most people it would seem this book was out of my league. I am a young woman at that, and I was curious to understand the male mind and the powers of love, obsession, and desire.
This is what I got. A sad book with even more disturbing characters. I wondered how this sad excuse of a man managed to get so many female students in bed with him? If it was because of intelligence, I would say he was a walking robot of mostly useless knowledge one attains from many years of boredom, being alone, and not exactly having much of a life. Ok so David Kepesh, compulsive womanizer, sex addict and crazy old man syndrome still in the age of trying to live young, or at least pretend he is young is a man skewed with reality.
I kept reading.
I could never relate to any of these characters, not even Consuela , a year apart from me in age, similar background and family story, and yet she seemed so blah besides her nice clothes and apparent other assets. This would be the kind of girl to go to bed with a much older man, perhaps a professor.
But why? What seriously compelled her to fall for him? Is it because she had younger boyfriends and they didn't please her in bed?
So now, men and women of all ages are just completely helpless to sex?
I can't believe in a story if the characters are so shallow and limitless. I can't cheer for a character if there is absolutley not a single good soul in the entire novel.
I kept reading.
I think what I really expected was the story to show the process of growth and change. A man, a woman, people who learn from life's events and make better because of it. It was clear that David Kepesh would start the book as a perverted, sexaholic man with bad choice of consistent words ( you'll learn these words early if you read the book ), and end it in the very same way...no dignity, no true emotions or feelings, still at 70 years old obsessing over a former students breasts.
There was no closure in this book, it left you suddenly hanging and didn't even give you hope that maybe this character of 156 pages had changed.
I was so pumped to read this book, and I can certainly tolerate flawed characters, but I can't really bear the idea that people live their whole lives the exact same way, no regret, no changes or growth occur for them, no revelations, no wake up calls to alert them. Nothing. Just 70 years of a shallow life and a woman who comes to him after 8 years pass. Because she wants him by her in her time of need. Could David Kepesh really fulfill a need like that?
I didn't think so. For me it was a story about a sad man and a sad woman, with parts of other characters not lovable or even likeable.
I'm waiting for the next novel when perhaps Philip Roth lets David Kepesh finally grow up, of course I wouldn't read such hogwash, and certainly by then this Kepesh character will be gone from this world.
Rating:
Summary: Flogging a Dead Horse
Review: I have a credential to crab about this book. As does the main character in this book, I teach at a major university and a think tank, have published a few books, appear on television a fair amount, am a mere decade younger than Roth's "protagonist" (or do I mean misogynist), and am quite aware of mid-20's femmes. I must to say this is the most unrealistic, stupid book written about these relationships, largely because, in Roth's book, they aren't relationships at all. Further, this book seems so scarily autobiographical (or did I mean to say autoerotic) that I am almost ashamed to be the same sex as the writer. At least in "Portnoy's Complaint" he beat off a lot. That doesn't harm anyone and may even make one's wrists stronger. But here, he is so fixated on sex, weird sex, and weirder sex that he becomes incapable of understanding at all that people may actually (gasp) fall in love and stay together for a long time, and that this is pretty important. In fact, he's contemptuous of it when he sees it in his own son. And, dear ladies out there, he views all this as the triumph of the rise of feminism. I bought this book because the subject of relationships with a substantial age difference is an interesting and provoking one to any 50-ish guy...and one I believe is best viewed through the prism of evolutionary biology and modern medicine, where we now confront the fact that women live long past reproductive maturity while men die essentially still capable. The fact that for millions of years most women died before then (check the Boston graveyards if you don't believe this) is evidence for serial monogamy, which opens up a remarkable unfairness to women that has developed as an unintended consequece of modern technology. I was hoping Roth had some insight on this, but he was too busy looking at his pud, which, in this case is the way he treats women. Oy Vey! Wann der Putz Shtet!!
Rating:
Summary: The surprises of the affair
Review: I have read much of Roth's oeuvre, but this book was intriguing in a different way than many of his other books. Roth always offers interesting insights into relationships that are apart from typical and accepted moral views held by most Americans. For myself, this is refreshing. In this particular book, Roth enters the inchoate stages of a dialogue concerning what an affair can become, the fact that it is a series of moments rather than one long relationship, and that it can involve more than sex.
This is not a book I would recommend to all readers. Rather, this is a book to be selectively read by those who fall into the same category as the best friend of David Kepesh (the main character of the novel), who Kepesh claims within the novel to be the only friend who did not morally judge Kepesh's actions or attempt to present him with a pious or self-righteous attitude. For those who can withhold judgment, this is a marvelous, insightful novella that speaks not only about lust, but about beauty, age, and mortality.
Rating: 
Summary: Disturbing Yet Riveting
Review: I have to say The Dying Animal broke no real new ground in the "Lolita" genre, and in typical Roth fashion, nothing really happens in the book, as he pretty much tells the story in first person past tense as if he were on a couch talking to a shrink. In short, he breaks every rule writers are advised to follow and the result is exactly what The New York Review of Books hails "A Disturbing Masterpiece." It is a perfect example of why I bypass the best seller table at any bookstore I patronize. It is an ugly story about a pathetic character and yet, because of Roth's ability to tell a story, I found myself unable to look away, and when I closed the cover for the last time I found myself unable to refrain from thinking about the book and how it left me feeling, and it made for quite a discussion with my girlfriend, to whom I'd read aloud several passages and who'd scanned the book cover to cover herself. Is it any wonder Roth has won just about every writing award, including the Pulitzer?
Rating:
Summary: An absolutely remarkable book
Review: I just finished reading Roth's latest novel and I'm nearly literally bowled over by it. Some absolutely amazing writing, certainly some of the best writing on sex and sexuality I've ever encountered. (There is, of course, a great deal of very bad writing about sex and so it's such a pleasure to encounter someone who writes about it with such verve and style as Roth does.) This little book is a huge achievement because it captures the tension between eros and thanatos....the forces of life and death that pull us one way and another in life. Roth is especially good at capturing the consciousness of an aging male psyche-which his of course is-and of showing us the amazing sexual force that animates nearly all life on this planet. It is a disturbing book as well, because it shows us how fully connected we are to the lives of our bodies, and how tragic it is when those bodies begin to give us intimations of our mortality. The turn at the book's conclusion is especially surprising and a reminder that those intimatations can come at any time in life. Don't miss this book.
Rating:
Summary: fascinating in many ways
Review: i read an advance copy of this over the weekend...roth is certainly on a mission. he publishes every year now (thankfully), and continues to explore not how to get on Oprah's list, but how to illuminate the male psyche. Sex, death, all the usual new york jewish intellectual obsessions, but explored not for comedy but for true understanding. there's a scene here involving sex and menstral blood that perfectly encompasses all of roth's themes and obsessions. A short (but actually a perfect length for this story) work, but as captivating and fascinating as any of his longer books.
Rating: 
Summary: Wallflower at the revolution
Review: I read Philip Roth's first few books then missed a couple of decades. Upon joining an online discussion group I read this book and find he has become just another old goat looking for young poon. Is he vying for that rascal Henry Miller`s mantle as Dirty Old Man of American Letters? I know that art can be about anything but an essay on the changes in society over the last forty years would have sufficed. Like many Woody Allen fans I prefer the older, funnier work. Roth is a fine writer and unlike some best selling authors he does have a lot to say. I just could not get past the story of a twenty year old entering into a liaison with a senior citizen. As young coeds in the sixties, my friends and I would never entertain such thoughts about even the youngest instructors. "He must be at least thirty and probably married." We had plenty of callow frat boys buzzing around who didn't know anything about anything and it suited us just fine. Attending college in Canada, the Vietnam War did not really affect us except for the occasional kid with a Yank accent panhandling on the street. Draft dodgers. We kept our distance because American boys had a reputation for being fast..... By the seventies I was safely married sat on the sidelines during the devolution of the freedom movement into the disco era. That generation jettisoned the ideology and kept the drugs. A writer of Roth's stature would have no end of groupies willing to sit at his feet or do anything else he wanted. It was amusing when he invoked the US Constitution to bolster his case for doing exactly as he pleased. Rogering as an Inalienable Right. His alter ego in the book is not an altogether hopeless case. Anyone as erudite and cultured as David Kepesh cannot be all bad. I found it endearing that he persisted with his piano playing even though he kept hitting wrong notes. He was truly attached to his friend George and went out of his way to make his last days meaningful even though it was an exercise in futility. We are all wary of being smothered by the very people from whom we seek comfort. Intimacy is fraught with danger. But being alone has pitfalls as well as pleasures. Having a peek beneath David's detached exterior it gives the reader hope that he will extend himself to the ailing Consuela. The affair that caused him to regress into adolescent jealousy and possessiveness may enable him to finally grow up. He only has to take the opportunity to redeem himself.
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