Rating: 
Summary: Roth, distilled to his most powerful essence
Review: Roth fans, students of serious literature, and those interested in a glimpse into the aging male psyche should truly enjoy this gem of a book. Roth proves his stature as one of America's greatest living writers by, in the mere span of roughly 150 large-type pages, offering insights into subjects such as man's intellectual nature versus man's sexual nature, Puritanism, academia and political correctness, the Sixties, marriage and family, mortality, and the randomness of fate. One could go on and on describing the many attributes of this book, but in the spirit of Roth's pithiness, I will just say: "read it!"
Rating:
Summary: Roth, distilled to his most powerful essence
Review: Roth fans, students of serious literature, and those interested in a glimpse into the aging male psyche should truly enjoy this gem of a book. Roth proves his stature as one of America's greatest living writers by, in the mere span of roughly 150 large-type pages, offering insights into subjects such as man's intellectual nature versus man's sexual nature, Puritanism, academia and political correctness, the Sixties, marriage and family, mortality, and the randomness of fate. One could go on and on describing the many attributes of this book, but in the spirit of Roth's pithiness, I will just say: "read it!"
Rating:
Summary: Apotheosis of Sex is Examined
Review: Roth's narrator, David Kopesh, writes this 156-page, terse, gem-etched novel in an essay style to express his anguish of experiencing raw lust as a misdirected form of longing for a kind of transcendence to fill the emptiness of his soul. A sixty-two-year-old lit professor, cultural critic, and minor celebritiy, Kopesh uses his privilege to seduce the youngest, most beautiful women in the world, students, groupies, sycophants. What elevates this story...is the context of competing social forces in the American psyche, the forces of hypersexuality vs. the forces of anti-sexuality. It appears that Kopesh's despair is that the more he seeks religious experience and fulfillment through sexual ecstasy the more empty, vulnerable, and discombobulated he becomes. He does not preach for or against the sexual revolution; rather, he shows the wreckage of his life as a sort of casualty of the sexual revolution, which promised freedom, happiness, and fulfillment through unlimited access to orgasms. A highly readable novel. What makes Roth such a major writer is that too many writers of his caliber waste everyone's time by blowing smoke up our butts while Roth speaks the truth in his own eloquent style.
Rating: 
Summary: The Eros Papers
Review: Roth, of course, writes another good book. His look at eros is always in a league by itself, and in this book he extends its plane in all directions. To some it will seem "revolutionary" or "selfish" (beyond family's all-star crucible (!!))) - - but that is not its aim. It's closer to say that it tries to re-situate, or re-constellate, Eros in American life. It reads as an aesthetic/puer defense of imaginative life. Not (no)autobiography, but the life with aesthetics and eros at its (near) center. With its grandness and repugnance a city in the face - - this is a snapshot . . ---- and a good one,
Rating: 
Summary: The Elderly Adolescent and His Angst
Review: Scanning this book as my other half poured over it with disarming fascination, I had to peek into what had so mesmerized him. After all, I hadn't read a Roth novel since my early 20's, already at that young age having determined that there was nothing here but adolescent angst. And this dying animal? Ah, but I had been right to not bother all these years and with all the in between novels. The story was quite the same one. This time the difference was only one of age. A Roth version of Lolita, an elderly man obsesses over a young woman who couldn't possibly care less, except for the intoxication of her power over the old wretch. Been there, read that. Has he nothing new to say? Even as my partner and I swam into ever deeper waters of discussion, my presentation of the woman's perspective, his from the side of the aging man, I had to concede that Roth has the technical skills of good writing well in hand. It takes small talent to write action; it takes skill to write about nothing, and still he moves the reader along. This does indeed read like a confession, an emotional purging, and it is done well enough, but to earn a Pulitzer, there must not only be skill, but substance as well. No prize here. If one other point is earned, I give it for title. So precise, so right, this title is a masterstroke in itself. Aside from that, spare me such men, spare me such novellas. I wish only such skill might have been used to tell more than one story, as Roth appears to have only one to tell.
Rating:
Summary: A Well Done Exploration on Life and Living, Death and Dying
Review: The Dying Animal isn't really a novel as we have come to expect it, there is no plot to speak of, barely any dialog, and it's 156 pages. What it is is an exploration on the nature of life and death, it's about growing old in a country obsessed with the young. The narrator of this monologue is David Kepesh, a 70ish professor reflecting on an affair he had with one of his much younger students several years earlier. Something has happened, which we discover towards the end of the work, which has put him in a particularly pensive and reflective mood. He talks on about his affair and other events in his life. He's not a particularly likeable person, some would consider what he does despicable and sexist, yet what he has to say is compelling. I don't think I could have taken 500 pages of the Dying Animal, but 156 seems about right. What Kepesh has to say is thoughtful and thought-provoking, and the point of his monologue becomes clear as the work draws to a close. The Dying Animal clearly isn't for the faint of heart, the easily offended. If you can handle a thought-provoking exposition with apologies to no one, give this one a try.
Rating:
Summary: More of the same from Roth, only creepier
Review: The last few years have seen a sudden resurgence in Philip Roth's literary reputation as he has come forth with some markedly original work, especially his masterpiece THE HUMAN STAIN. But his newest novella, THE DYING ANIMAL, seems a step back in the old direction, and seems a recycling of his old themes from his Seventies and Sixties fiction. Once again, an impossibly horny writer and academic living in the New York area uses women for sex with little regard to their feelings or to their existence outside of himself as human beings in their own right. Certainly the novella is concerned with understanding--and even critiquing--Kepesh's ethical positions, but isn't this just all more of the same from Roth? The sexagenarian Kepesh is so morally repulsive that it's hard to want to spend much time with him, and his situation (he not only attracts much, much, much younger women, but seems unable to beat them off with a stick) seems a bit fantastic. Roth has dipped too many times from the same well--and it's become more than a bit embarrassing.
Rating:
Summary: The Old Man with the4 Breast Fetish
Review: There seems to be just one main theme for Vidal - one he comes back to again and again: SEX. As the author ages, so does the protagonist professor David Kepesh, age seventy and telling a story of eight years ago. At the center of the story is Consuela Castillo, of Cuban descent and then 24 years old. She has the most perfect female form, magnificent large breasts, an almost translucent white skin and black hair. She is just simply perfect, also in everything she does. This liaison lasts about a good year, stopping abruptly. Some years later, Kepesh gets a call from Consuela, who needs his help and understanding. She has breast cancer, already lost her hair and will now lose one of her breasts. Roth mainly writes about the juxtaposition of old age and youth. He finds that youth has its advantages, but they are not guaranteed. Consuela's youth and perfection are being destroyed, while Kepesh lives on. There is a lesson hidden here somewhere, and the lesson has to do with old age surviving. And that beauty is not reliable.
Rating:
Summary: huh?
Review: think rambling, jekyllian Hemingway. IN and OUT, UP and DOWN, but going nowhere. Mercifully short though, I must say. Should have been a magazine article. The cover eludes to some erotic undertone, but I couldn't find it. "Memoirs of a whiny old man" should have been the title...
Rating:
Summary: An entertaining and deep meditation on human sexuality
Review: This is a review of _The Dying Animal_ by Philip Roth (in the Vintage Books paperback edition). A friend recommended this novella to me, and I'm very glad she did. It really isn't going too far to describe it (as one published review did) as a "masterpiece." The narrator is "David Kepesh," a sexagenarian college professor and minor celebrity intellectual (he has a PBS show) who routinely sleeps with selected female students from his advanced seminar (wisely waiting until after the grades have been turned in -- although nowadays only a "David Kepesh" or a Philip Roth could get away with even this). Kepesh describes (to an unidentified interlocutor, who remains silent until the book's final page) the trajectory of his affair with a Cuban-American student, Consuela Castillo. Along the way, there are interesting (and relevant to the story) digressions on America's sexual revolution of the 60's and 70's, the colonial-era sexual and religious radical Thomas Morton, the surreal nature of the Y2K celebrations, etc. This is one of those lovely books that works on many different levels. First, it is a funny book. Those with delicate sensibilities will be offended by some of the humor, but it's hard not to laugh. This is also (unsurprisingly for a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist) a well written book: "That body is still new to her, she's still trying it out, thinking it through, a bit like a kid walking the streets with a loaded gun and deciding whether he's packing it to protect himself or to begin a life of crime" (p. 4). But what most engaged me was how Roth uses the novel to explore some of the thorny issues that surround human sexuality. Let's face it: sex is complicated. Power is part of what complicates it. And the power is inescapable: "You're going to rule out dominance? You're going to rule out yielding? The dominating is the flint, it strikes the spark, it sets it going" (p. 20). We begin the novel thinking that the professor has the position of power in this relationship. (Campus sexual harassment rules seem to take this for granted.) But it soon becomes clear that Kepesh is the more infatuated one. (Or is he? For in this novel, as in real life, everything is complex and uncertain.) Sex is further complicated by marriage, for which Kepesh has harsh words: "Look, heterosexual men going into marriage are like priests going into the Church: they take the vow of chastity, only seemingly without knowing it until three, four, five years down the line" (p. 67). Kepesh's response to this discovery in his own case was to divorce his wife. His son never forgave him for this, and to prove that he is a better man than his father, he has stayed in an unhappy marraige rather than walk out. The general philosophical perspective of the book is (in a very broad sense) Nietzschean. The narrator is an advocate of freeing oneself from convention and sentimental attachment. His son is a prime example of someone whose "morality" is simply a self-mortifying effort at feeling morally superior to others. However, part of Roth's genius as a novelist is that he does not succumb to the temptation to force his characters to toe an ideological line. In this novel (again, as in life), reality is always at least a little bit in friction with our philosophy. So, Kepesh finds himself wondering aloud, "I don't even know after a while what I'm desperate for. ... Her soul? Her youth? Her simple mind? Maybe it's worse than that -- maybe now that I'm nearing death, I also long secretly not to be free" (p. 106). This is a Platonic view of love. (Like Kepesh, I apologize for my academic tone, but "I'm a teacher -- didacticism is my destiny" [p. 112].) For Plato, love is painful, love destroys who we were -- but it is also the only thing that can make us whole, and can make us greater than we once were. So, on the last page of the story (don't worry -- I won't reveal details), Kepesh is faced with an existential choice: is freedom more important than anything, and worth abandoning or destroying anything that interferes with it (as Nietzsche thought)? Or is the pain of love a guide to where we must go, to become complete (as Plato said)? This is "the eternal problem of attachment" (p. 105), and the central theme of this wonderful book.
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