Decades after the 1960s sexual revolution, one man remains determined to live a life of emancipated manhood.
As David Kepesh, the narrator of Philip Roth’s THE DYING
ANIMAL, candidly states—and he states everything candidly—his
main concern is "how to be serious over a lifetime about
one’s modest, private pleasures." It’s a subject
much more far-reaching than it might appear, for in asserting
his claim to pleasure he must defy the institutions of family
and marriage and conventional notions of love. The potential rewards
are also great: freedom to live life on one’s own terms—and,
as Kepesh reminds us, "Sex isn’t just friction and shallow
fun. Sex is also the revenge on death." But death casts its
shadow even in the most unexpected places, and it may coax Kepesh
out of a life of nonattachment, for a girl for whom he feels something
dangerously close to love.
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 volupté,"
undo him completely, and a maddening sexual possessiveness transports
him to the depths of deforming jealousy. The carefree erotic adventure
evolves, over eight years, into a story of grim 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 now 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 as well as a striking exploration
of attachment and freedom, The Dying Animal is intellectually
bold, forcefully candid, wholly of our time, and utterly without
precedent—a story of sexual discovery told about himself
by a man of seventy, a story about the power of eros and the fact
of death.
About the Author, Philip Roth
In the 1990s Philip Roth won America’s
four major literary awards
in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony
(1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993),
the National Book Award for Sabbath’s Theater (1995),
and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral
(1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking
Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year
he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously
he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife
(1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye,
Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain,
concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar
America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner
Award as well as Britain’s W.H. Smith Award for Best Book
of the Year. Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933
and was educated at Bucknell University and the University of
Chicago.
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