The Dying Animal

Rating:
Summary: Still, no apologies from Roth--and that's a good thing.
Review: I view this novella as a breath between the major works Roth has been producing routinely for the past several years, and a welcome one at that. Is Kepesh reprehensible? Of course he is, and that's precisely the point. And whether you view the book as misogynistic is BESIDES the point, like it or not. Any capable reader would be wise not to equate Kepesh's character with Roth--even if resemblances to "real life" may occur here and there. Roth could easily become more "politically correct" to woo and coax the Noble Prize bigwigs, but he doesn't, and that to me strengthens his reputation as a writer. And for the person who made the mistake of identifying Roth as the author of the BENNY PODA YEARS: how could you possibly mistake this as a work of Roth's? Please!

Rating:
Summary: Roth's Complaint: Sex & Death
Review: In "The Dying Animal" Roth gives us yet another masterful example of how one can utilize the pure and daily vernacular in a literary form. Roth here, as he did in "Sabbath's Theater," has raised the level of his pornographic imagery, to literary status. Yet, the book really has little to do with Sex, and much more to do with Death. Throughout the book, we are faced with a college professor who has had a long and intricate series of affairs with his students, just after they were no longer his students. But, the protagonist focuses on one particular student and this student is a collage of past student affairs, which it is the reader's assumption that Roth has indeed experienced personally.

So then, what is Roth's complaint? Not only is his perfect sexual animal a complete and total obsession for him, but in fact, Roth depicts her as potentially, the "last" student affair. And, if in fact, if it is the last student affair, then it is more on the side of dying, than it is on the side of living.

Roth therefore is faced with a terrible dillema. After 4 decades of obsessive sexuality with every and all types of women, he finds himself allied with the concept that ultimately, when the sex ends; the dying starts. Roth wages battle within his mind, to overcome this inevitability, but he is nonetheless, stuck with the conclusion, that as his sex life draws to a close, so to, does his mortal life. As in "Portnoy's Complaint", Roth once again returns to the image that sex is synonymous with life, and lack of sex is synonymous with death. But, rather than Portnoy's conclusion, that it is now time to begin, here Roth seems to be saying, it is now time to start to end. Once one no longer can experience that human ecstasy, then that person's life is drawing to conclusion. He leaves the question unresolved for himself, as is not unusual for Roth, as to whether he should accept his oncoming death and start to adapt, or whether to remain in denial, until it is no longer deniable.

Once again, Roth gives us a legacy, which, if it has any flaw at all, would be the shortness of the work. Normally, Roth would give us a fuller understanding of the other characters in the book, but in this case, perhaps, it was only the protagonist's thoughts that really mattered to Roth, and thus, the actual persona of his other characters was superfluous to his message. This is a highly recommended read, and will allow the reader to absorb a complex message in a slight and incredibly well written 150 pages.

Rating:
Summary: First, arousal; then, tears. Just like a romance.
Review: In the svelte-novella style of DeLillo's BODY ARTIST, Philip Roth offers a tawdry, melancholic, almost self-torturingly unsentimental portrait of a libertine slipping into old age; so unrelenting in its spiritual grime, he might have called it THE BODY RETAILER. David Kopesh, as near and as far from "Philip Roth" as those cockamamie names Woody Allen makes up for the single character he plays, is a cultural critic and man-about-town in his early sixties. He meets a prim, tailored Cuban woman named Consuela, most remarkable for his melon breasts. His addiction, in late-middle, early-old age to her lusciousness, and his brutally rendered relationships with others (particularly his castrated son and a middle-aged lover painted in compassionate but unsparing light), all point toward an elegiac conclusion. Instead, Roth gives us one of karmic violence, climaxing on an image that at first seems almost comically misogynistic, but which soon after takes on a fully earned, excruciating pathos.

Like a cross between Saul Bellow's RAVELSTEIN and Woody Allen's DECONSTRUCTING HARRY, THE DYING ANIMAL--the title is as apposite as it is awful--is the funeral wail of a Jewish lion in winter, a cultural kingpin for whom there are no fresh laurels and nothing left save lust and the long goodbye. All three of these guys are surprisingly unsparing when it comes to revealing their own chauvinisms, their personal failings, the petty cruelties that come with their now-entrenched high berths. Elsewhere, that nudity can have the scent of narcissism; here, it feels both genuinely clinical and genuinely impassioned and despairing.

Roth has become fixated, terrifiedly, on the cosmic boomerang of bad vibrations. It's not just a torturing conscience but the rigged roulette wheel of God the Father that brings the Rothian hero to his knees. The finale--a seemingly unconscious riff on the melodramatic wrapup of Nabokov's LOLITA--is as genuinely moving as the best parts of AMERICAN PASTORAL; maybe more so. Like Robert Altman (and unlike Woody Allen), age seems to make Roth pick up steam, force, belief, will.

Rating:
Summary: The Dead Animal
Review: It's time for Philip Roth to grow up. He's what? 70? The guy has made a career out of his puerile obsession with sex, but his routine is tired. Very tired. Once again, he's dealing with his own prepubescent sexual insecurities, this time through the main character in The Dying Animal. And what's this lifelong fixation on a woman's breasts? Did Roth's mother refuse to breast feed him when he was a child? Well, get over it!

Sure, he can tell a story and is very clever, witty, comical, etc. And yes, I'm sure there's a parable in the sad story of an aging Professor sleeping with a new student each year. But the idea of someone devoting his life to the pursuit of casual sex just doesn't fly. Not when the Lothario (Philip Roth in disguise) is 60 or 70! What, are his hormones still out of control? It like Mr. Chips meets Hugh Hefner. Roth has created a caricature that just isn't believable. It's too bad, since the premise of the story was TITillating (I hope Roth appreciates my anatomical pun) and had some promise. But then he lapsed into his confusing philosophical tirades and misogynistic babblings. Roth quickly lost my interest.

Roth tries to humanize David Kepesh by dwelling on the protagonist's other obsession, which is playing the piano and listening to classical music. But Kepesh fondles himself while listening to Beethoven, thereby blaspheming another form of beauty.

Roth has been trading off his Jewish angst for his entire literary career. He's a one trick pony. Let's see some creativity, some breadth. Stop hitting us over the head with this Freudian obsession with sex and bodily functions. Roth should get out of the gutter for a change. And finally, his literary style in The Dying Animal of omitting dialogue and turning the whole story into an extended essay was cumbersome. Luckily, the story was only 160 pages. The Dying Animal is really The Dead Animal.

Rating:
Summary: Satisfying Coda to Roth's "American Trilogy"
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Satisfying Coda to Roth's "American Trilogy"
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Desire, Despair and Deliverance
Review: Once again Roth surprises and delights readers with a novella of the later life of David Kepesh, the protagonist of two of his much earlier works, _The Breast_, and _The Professor of Desire_. Desire in Roth's characters certainly springs eternal; it is however less the concrete fleshly concerns about which Roth is superficially writing than it is about the abstract concern of his protagonist with love as both subject and object. Don't be fooled by the outward trappings of his fiction; Roth has spent his career weaving intricately patterned fiction and being misread by those who see only what is on the surface. This is a wonderful, hopeful book about personal salvation, and, we hope, is but one more reason why Philip Roth should be the next American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Rating:
Summary: Roth's "Notes From Underground"
Review: Philip Roth has created brilliant bitter comedy in this extended monologue delivered by the aging, inordinately self-conscious culture critic and anti-hero, David Kepesh. Particularly witty is Roth's perception that Kepesh is just the sort of comic monster that our society must necessarily produce. Our founding documents, with their imbalance in favor of the individual pursuing happiness, reduced in the 60's to a distortion in favor of the solitary soul pursuing pleasure for its own sake, give us Kepesh, here rounding out his years. As amusing as painful is Kepesh's blindness, despite his clever self-consciousness, to the reality that the path he follows is absurdly narrow given the facts of his own experience. Not only is the sexual urge, for instance, an upsetter of his orderly, metronome-like human plans, but so is death, which occurs when it will, striking at times the young and beautiful , not just the old. Kepesh's 60's ideology is amusingly and movingly revealed as too simple to fit his own life's experiences within space, time, and inevitable decay. The comedy here is that Kepesh,for all his consistent emphasis on individual pleasure apart from thought, is actually choking to death from too much thought, while intellectually remaining, because of his principles, essentially clueless. The central experiences he relates, are ones of which he, if not his readers, appears to miss the meaning.

Rating:
Summary: The worst book of the year?
Review: Phillip Roth has become the worst type of writer, an educated dirty old man. The Dying Animal is a stunningly misogynistic, and deeply flawed account of a man's attempts to justify his own shortcomings as a sexual being. Without the subtlety and grace of Nabokov's "Lolita", the Dying Animal is a boring account of a boring, pathetic old man, and at the end of the novel we are left with absolutely no impression that Roth has any understanding of his central character, other than the fact that he obviously likes young breasts. Roth's brief peak as a writer would seem to be over, and this novel is a puerile demonstration of bad writing dressed up for the intellectual set. Truly awful...go and read Lolita.

Rating:
Summary: Facing mortality
Review: Phillip Roth has done it again - written a book that grabs an audience for multiple reasons, not the least of which is his frank sexual experiences dating back to Portnoy's Complaint, then manages to use his magnetic wrtier's tools to explore some of life's more major questions. This short novel is a an interior conversation of a man growing old but still depending on the only badge of youth he has ever known - sexual performance. Yes, his affairs with his students are less than appropriate. Yes, he seems to make secondary any other encounter that might result in unveiling the presence of a scholarly mind. But at the same time, Roth's main character grows closer to the inevitability of death as merely a part of the life cycle in his central alliance with a Cuban born beauty. Not to destroy the twist that occurs in his obsession with corporal things, Roth finally makes this affair conclude with discovery that is sensitive and heartfelt. "The passage of time. We're in the swim, sinking in time, until we finally drown and go." This book is filled with rich word pictures, philosophical flights of thought, and just plain fine writing. Worth reading on many levels.