The Dying Animal

by Philip Roth

Overview

David 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, when he left 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547344010
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/18/2001
Series:	David Kepesh Series
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	412,248
File size:	316 KB

About the Author

PHILIP ROTH (1933–2018) won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral in 1997. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner and Saul Bellow, among others. He twice won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003–2004” and the W.H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year, making Roth the first writer in the forty-six-year history of the prize to win it twice.

In 2005 Roth became the third living American writer to have his works published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize. In 2012 he won Spain’s highest honor, the Prince of Asturias Award, and in 2013 he received France’s highest honor, Commander of the Legion of Honor.

Hometown:

Connecticut

Date of Birth:

March 19, 1933

Place of Birth:

Newark, New Jersey

Education:

B.A. in English, Bucknell University, 1954; M.A. in English, University of Chicago, 1955

Read an Excerpt

I knew her eight years ago. She was in my class. I don’t teach full- time anymore, strictly speaking don’t teach literature at all--for years now just the one class, a big senior seminar in critical writing called Practical Criticism. I attract a lot of female students. For two reasons. Because it’s a subject with an alluring combination of intellectual glamour and journalistic glamour and because they’ve heard me on NPR reviewing books or seen me on Thirteen talking about culture. Over the past fifteen years, being cultural critic on the television program has made me fairly well known locally, and they’re attracted to my class because of that. In the beginning, I didn’t realize that talking on TV once a week for ten minutes could be so impressive as it turns out to be to these students. But they are helplessly drawn to celebrity, however inconsiderable mine may be.
Now, I’m very vulnerable to female beauty, as you know. Everybody’s defenseless against something, and that’s it for me. I see it and it blinds me to everything else. They come to my first class, and I know almost immediately which is the girl for me. There is a Mark Twain story in which he runs from a bull, and the bull looks up to him when he’s hiding in a tree, and the bull thinks, “You are my meat, sir.” Well, that “sir” is transformed into “young lady” when I see them in class. It is now eight years ago--I was already sixty-two, and the girl, who is called Consuela Castillo, was twenty-four. She is not like the rest of the class. She doesn’t look like a student, at least not like an ordinary student. She’s not a demi-adolescent, she’s not a slouching, unkempt, “like”-ridden girl. She’s well spoken, sober, her posture is perfect--she appears to know something about adult life along with how to sit, stand, and walk. As soon as you enter the class, you see that this girl either knows more or wants to. The way she dresses. It isn’t ex-actly what’s called chic, she’s certainly not flamboyant, but, to begin with, she’s never in jeans, pressed or unpressed. She dresses carefully, with quiet taste, in skirts, dresses, and tailored pants. Not to desen-sualize herself but more, it would seem, to professionalize herself, she dresses like an attractive secretary in a prestigious legal firm. Like the secretary to the bank chairman. She has a cream-colored silk blouse under a tailored blue blazer with gold buttons, a brown pocketbook with the patina of expensive leather, and little ankle boots to match, and she wears a slightly stretchy gray knitted skirt that re-veals her body lines as subtly as such a skirt possibly could. Her hair is done in a natural but cared-for manner. She has a pale complexion, the mouth is bowlike though the lips are full, and she has a rounded forehead, a polished forehead of a smooth Brancusi elegance. She is Cuban. Her family are prosperous Cubans living in Jersey, across the river in Bergen County. She has black, black hair, glossy but ever so slightly coarse. And she’s big. She’s a big woman. The silk blouse is unbuttoned to the third button, and so you see she has powerful, beauti- ful breasts. You see the cleavage immediately. And you see she knows it. You see, despite the decorum, the meticulousness, the cautiously soigné style--or because of them--that she’s aware of herself. She comes to the first class with the jacket buttoned over her blouse, yet some five minutes into the session, she has taken it off. When I glance her way again, I see that she’s put it back on. So you understand that she’s aware of her power but that she isn’t sure yet how to use it, what to do with it, how much she even wants it. 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.
And she’s aware of something else, and this I couldn’t know from the one class meeting: she finds culture important in a reverential, old- fashioned way. Not that it’s something she wishes to live by. She doesn’t and she couldn’t--too traditionally well brought up for that-- but it’s important and wonderful as nothing else she knows is. She’s the one who finds the Impressionists ravishing but must look long and hard--and always with a sense of nagging confoundment--at a Cubist Picasso, trying with all her might to get the idea. She stands there waiting for the surprising new sensation, the new thought, the new emotion, and when it won’t come, ever, she chides herself for being inadequate and lacking . . . what? She chides herself for not even knowing what it is she lacks. Art that smacks of modernity leaves her not merely puzzleed but disappointed in herself. She would love for Picasso to matter more, perhaps to transform her, but there’s a scrim drawn across the proooooscenium of genius that obscures her vision and keeps her worshiping at a bit of a distance. She gives to art, to all of art, far more than she gets back, a sort of earnestness that isn’t without its poignant appeal. A good heart, a lovely face, a gaze at once invit- ing and removed, gorgeous breasts, and so newly hatched as a woman that to find fragments of broken shell adhering to that ovoid forehead wouldn’t have been a surprise. I saw right away that this was going to be my girl.
Now, I have one set rule of some fifteen years’ standing that I never break. I don’t any longer get in touch with them on a private basis until they’ve completed their final exam and received their grade and I am no longer officially in loco parentis. In spite of temptation-- or even a clear-cut signal to begin the flirtation and make the approach--I haven’t broken this rule since, back in the mid-eighties, the phone number of the sexual harassment hotline was first posted outside my office door. I don’t get in touch with them any earlier so as not to run afoul of those in the university who, if they could, would seriously impede my enjoyment of life.
I teach each year for fourteen weeks, and during that time I don’t have affairs with them. I play a trick instead. It’s an honest trick, it’s an open and aboveboard trick, but it is a trick nonetheless. After the final examination and once the grades are in, I throw a party in my apartment for the students. It is always a success and it is always the same. I invite them for a drink at about six o’clock. I say that from six to eight we are going to have a drink, and they always stay till two in the morning. The bravest ones, after ten o’clock, develop into lively characters and tell me what they really are interested in. In the Practical Criticism seminar there are about twenty students, sometimes as many as twenty-five, so there will be fifteen, sixteen girls and five or six boys, of whom two or three are straight. Half of this group has left the party by ten. Generally, one straight boy, maybe one gay boy, and some nine girls will stay. They’re invariably the most cultivated, intelligent, and spirited of the lot. They talk about what they’re reading, what they’re listening to, what art shows they’ve seen--enthusiasms that they don’t normally go on about with their elders or necessarily with their friends. They find one another in my class. And they find me. During the party they suddenly see I am a human being. I’m not their teacher, I’m not my reputation, I’m not their parent. I have a pleasant, orderly duplex apartment, they see my large library, aisles of double-faced bookshelves that house a lifetime’s reading and take up almost the entire downstairs floor, they see my piano, they see my devotion to what I do, and they stay.
My funniest student one year was like the goat in the fairy tale that goes into the clock to hide. I threw the last of them out at two in the morning, and while saying good night, I missed one girl. I said, “Where is our class clown, Prospero’s daughter?” “Oh, I think Miranda left,” somebody said. I went back into the apartment to start cleaning the place up and I heard a door being closed upstairs. A bathroom door. And Miranda came down the stairs, laughing, radi-ant with a kind of goofy abandon--I’d never, till that moment, realized that she was so pretty--and she said, “Wasn’t that clever of me? I’ve been hiding in your upstairs bathroom, and now I’m going to sleep with you.” A little thing, maybe five foot one, and she pulled off her sweater and showed me her tits, revealing the adolescent torso of an incipiently transgressive Bal-thus virgin, and of course we slept together. All eve-ning long, much like a young girl escaped from the perilous melodrama of a Balthus painting into the fun of the class party, Miranda had been on all fours on the floor with her rump raised or lying helplessly prostrate on my sofa or lounging gleefully across the arms of an easy chair seemingly oblivious of the fact that with her skirt riding up her thighs and her legs undecorously parted she had the Balthusian air of being half undressed while fully clothed. Everything’s hidden and nothing’s concealed. Many of these girls have been having sex since they were fourteen, and by their twenties there are one or two curious to do it with a man of my years, if just the once, and eager the next day to tell all their friends, who crinkle up their faces and ask, “But what about his skin? Didn’t he smell funny? What about his long white hair? What about his wattle? What about his little pot belly? Didn’t you feel sick?” Miranda told me afterward, “You must have slept with hundreds of women. I wanted to see what it would be like.” “And?” And then she said things I didn’t entirely believe, but it didn’t matter. She had been audacious--she had seen she could do it, game and terrified though she may have been while hid-ing in the bathroom. She discovered how courageous she was confronting this unfamiliar juxtaposition, that she could conquer her initial fears and any initial revulsion, and I--as regards the juxtaposition--had a wonderful time altogether. Sprawling, clowning, ca-vorting Miranda, posing with her underwear at her feet. Just the pleasure of looking was lovely. Though that was hardly the only reward. The decades since the sixties have done a remarkable job of completing the sexual revolution. This is a generation of astonishing fellators. There’s been nothing like them ever before among their class of young women.

Copyright © 2001 by Philip Roth

Reading Group Guide

1. To begin, answer these questions using the book as your guide. Read aloud the relevant sentences or passages.
a. Why is Janie Wyatt Kepesh’s hero [pp. 48–58]?
b. Why is Caroline Lyons Kepesh’s lover [pp. 46–48, 69–76]?
c. Why does Miranda stay behind after the party [pp. 7–9]?
d. Why does Elena Hrabovsky come to Kepesh when she’s unhappy about her life with men? What is Kepesh’s response to her unhappiness [pp. 107–110]?
e. Why is Kepesh’s description of Consuela’s vulva so detailed [p. 103]? Why the aquatic and artistic references? What human emotion informs this passage?

2. What are the sources of pleasure in Consuela Castillo and David Kepesh’s relationship? What do they offer each other? What allows each to “master” the other? Describe Consuela.

3. Why does Kepesh become obsessively jealous? Do his pleasure and jealousy derive from the same source?

4. What is the place of music in Kepesh’s life? What about books?

5. After Consuela leaves Kepesh, his friend the poet George O’Hearn warns him to stay away from her: “This is the pathology in its purest form. . . . You violated the law of aesthetic distance. You sentimentalized the aesthetic experience with this girl—you personalized it, you sentimentalized it, and you lost the sense of separation essential to your enjoyment” [p. 99]. Why would George suggest, and Kepesh be receptive to, the notion that sexual relations be governed by aesthetic laws?

6. Kepesh agrees with George that “attachment is ruinous, ” finds those who voluntarily give up their freedom“ridiculous, ” and feels that “marriage at its best is a sure-fire stimulant to the thrills of licentious subterfuge” [p. 111]. His son Kenny, who struggles to make his own marriage work, accuses him of gross irresponsibility, of confusing sexual freedom with vulgar self-interest, of behaving like a lecherous fool. Does the novel resolve these conflicting points of view? Does it endorse one position over the other or simply bring them into clarifying opposition?

7. Why doesn’t Kepesh’s son Kenny listen to his father? Is Kepesh not giving Kenny good advice?

8. In what ways is The Dying Animal about the intersection of America’s cultural history with David Kepesh’s personal history? How does he interpret the sixties? How does the sexual revolution “revolutionize” his life? What does it cost him?

9. Kepesh argues that family life is childish and that “emancipated manhood never has had a social spokesman or an educational system. It has no social status because people don’t want it to have social status” [p. 112]. Why do people refuse to give “emancipated manhood” social status? Do they give “emancipated womanhood” social status? If Kepesh were gay or female, would that alter your response to the book?

10. Why does Roth include the extended section on George O’Hearn’s death? What is the motive behind O’Hearn’s final desperate attempt to undress his wife [pp. 121–3]?

11. How does Consuela’s illness abolish the age difference between her and Kepesh?

12. Even though its last word is “finished, ” and even though its final pages are filled with anxiety about death, The Dying Animal is open-ended. Why does Roth choose to close the book in this way? What is likely to happen to David Kepesh? Will he ignore his listener’s warning and go to Consuela? If so, will it be the end of him?

Editorial Reviews

Fans of Philip Roth -- arguably the greatest living American writer -- need no introduction to the hero of The Dying Animal, David Kepesh, whose previous incarnations as a sexual being were chronicled in The Breast and The Professor of Desire. Kepesh, divorced, white-haired, and over 60, is an eminent TV cultural critic and a star lecturer at a New York college. But in the aftermath of a relationship with a well-mannered Cuban student named Consuelo Castillo, Kepesh finds his life in erotic disarray.

bn.com

The productivity and urgency of Roth's work for the past decade stand alone in contemporary American fiction. This novel is clearly an attempt to get down what he knows about life and culture. But surely dispatches this urgent have rarely been so honed, so irreducible and hard, so compassionate and unforgiving. There isn't an American writer working who can touch him.
— Salon

Charles Taylor

Novelists who like to resurrect their protagonists from book to book are often said to use those figures for a kind of literary division of labor. Different stock characters allow the novelist to stake out diverse personae, no single one of whom encapsulates the author's entire sensibility. Perhaps more than any other contemporary writer, Philip Roth is devoted to the practice. He has what he calls his "Zuckerman books" (in fact, eight of them); the experimental "Roth books," whose protagonist, "Philip Roth," dramatizes the blurry boundaries between fact and fiction; and his "Kepesh books"—to which he now adds a mordant novella, The Dying Animal.

To read Roth's novels with any degree of sympathy is to fall instantly beneath the spell of their characteristic first-person narrative and to feel the power of Roth's voice: urgent, intimate, captivatingly intelligent and bitterly comic. Nearly all of Roth's heroes are desperate people, yearning to make sense of their lives and at the same time to grab us by the lapels. What has distinguished Kepesh in this group is simply that he is a little more desperate, a little less dignified than his peers.

Divided between his high-minded dedication to culture and his rampaging id, Kepesh has raved in solipsistic isolation through two previous novels. In The Breast, Roth's homage to Kafka and Gogol published in 1972, the lecherous Kepesh found himself unaccountably transformed into a six-foot-tall, 155-pound human mammary gland. Five years later, a prequel, The Professor of Desire, recounted the sorry tale of Kepesh's early romantic history, in which, torn between his longing for the dignified life of theman of letters and his irrepressible desires, Kepesh wheeled from one disastrous relationship to another.

While Roth never explains how Kepesh escaped the anatomical imprisonment he experienced in The Breast to become the man he is here—an elderly, mildly self-important and slightly ridiculous cultural critic—he does make it clear that The Dying Animal is a kind of coda to his recent trilogy. Kepesh's biography is a testament to the bewildering course of postwar American history and to the astonishing, and terrifying, freedoms it appeared to open.

For Kepesh, the heart of this story lies in the sexual revolution, but, like Roth's earlier protagonists, he is never able to think of his personal desires and his private torments without imagining that they exemplify a larger vision of American liberty. "Am I or am I not a candidate for this wild, sloppy, raucous repudiation, this wholesale wrecking of the inhibitive past?" Kepesh asks himself. "Can I master the discipline of freedom as opposed to the recklessness of freedom? How does one turn freedom into a system?" Those are big questions, and in Roth's recent work they have resulted in big, complex and profoundly dark novels.

Kepesh is a media persona, the kind of critic who does three-minute essays on PBS and book reviews for NPR. His natural genre is not tragedy but farce, and he appears accordingly at the center of that classic story of ludicrous behavior, the older man's obsession with a younger woman. The Dying Animal is the story of his brief affair and long, jealous obsession with Consuela Castillo, a voluptuous young student nearly forty years his junior.

As Kepesh notes himself, this is not a story designed to evoke sorrow and pity. We have entered, he warns, "the realm of the ridiculous." Except that Roth's novel never really becomes that ridiculous, and his heart never seems in the farcical story he appears to have set out to tell.

For a tale of sexual obsession, the story is weirdly lacking in vitality, or passion or comedy, and it includes few of the hallmarks of erotic torment (the fetishistic lingering over the love object, the constant worry over the intentions of the beloved, the anguished speculation about rivals) traditional to the genre. Kepesh admits that he suffered terrible jealousy, but we never get the sense that he has felt a pang. Roth seems more interested in diagramming the conflicts that have long bothered Kepesh—the tensions between mind and body, freedom and convention—than in making his alleged torment seem real. With the exception of a brilliantly vivid subplot in which Kepesh recounts his battles with his reproachful, middle-age son, the book remains strangely lifeless, and Kepesh's passion seems mainly theoretical. As if to underscore that fact, Roth ends the story with a crude plot twist lifted almost directly from Jacqueline Susann's cult novel Valley of the Dolls.

Rather than a story about an old man's silly efforts to hold onto youth, the book turns out to be a tribute to Kepesh's intelligence and rigor, to the tentative victory of freedom over desire, of mind over body—and, ultimately, of Kepesh over Consuela. It is an ugly conclusion to a story that grows harsher and more disturbing as one goes along. In the novella's unsettling last lines, Roth hints at a possibility that also haunted Kepesh's narrative in The Breast, that we may have been imprisoned all along in the deluded thoughts of a highly unreliable narrator. The triumph of Kepesh's freedom, it seems—like his bodily imprisonment—may be all in his mind.
—Sean McCann (Excerpted Review)

Eros and mortality are the central themes of Roth's frank, unsparing and curious new novella. It's curious not only because of its short form (new for Roth), but because he seems to have assumed the mantle of Saul Bellow, writing pages of essay-like exposition on contemporary social phenomena and advancing the narrative through introspection rather than dialogue. The protagonist is again David Kepesh (of The Breast and The Professor of Desire), who left his wife and son during the sexual revolution vowing to indulge his erotic needs without encumbrance. Kepesh is now an eminent 70-year-old cultural critic and lecturer at a New York college, recalling a devastating, all-consuming affair he had eight years before with voluptuous 24-year-old Consuela Castillo, a graduate student and daughter of a prosperous Cuban migr family. From the beginning, Kepesh is oppressed by the "unavoidable poignancy" of their age difference, and he suffers with the jealous knowledge that this liaison will likely be his last; even when locked in the throes of sexual congress, a death's head looms in his imagination. The end of the affair casts him into a long depression. When Consuela contacts him again eight years later, on the New Year's Eve of the millennium, their reunion is doubly ironic in the Roth tradition. Consuela has devastating news about her body, and it's obvious that retribution is at hand for the old libertine. Roth's candor about an elderly man's consciousness that he's "a dying animal" (from the Yeats poem) is unsentimental, and his descriptions of the lovers' erotic acts push the envelope in at least one scene involving menstruation. The novella is as brilliantly written, line by line, as any book in Roth's oeuvre, and it's bound to be talked about with gusto. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

That the listener may come to dislike the narrator of this story is testament to its intensity. David Kepesh, professor of comparative literature and local TV pundit, is in his 70s when he confides this account of his May-December affair with a former student. Told in the first person, Kepesh's introduction to himself and to Consuela, his 24-year-old love goddess (ask him about her breasts), is framed within a value system that uses sex as its mortar. Kepesh, whom Roth introduced as a 38-year-old in The Breast and later starred in The Professor of Desire, never outgrew the 1960s free-love culture that inspired him to leave his wife and son to hold court as a sexual savant. Kepesh may not be likable, but he is fascinating. Reader Arliss Howard relates the story as if to a dinner companion a bit bored, unabashed, and pruriently matter-of-fact. A former National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, Roth ensnares the listener with a rich narrative; highly recommended for all adult fiction collections. Judith Robinson, Univ. at Buffalo, NY Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

The recent creative surge that has produced some of Roth's best fiction continues with this intense short novel narrated by David Kepesh (protagonist also of The Breast and The Professor of Desire), who's a more highly eroticized counterpart of Roth's other serial alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. The subject is Kepesh's reluctant arrival at the threshold of old age and his unquenched vulnerability to the spectacle of sex, to which he wryly refers as "the imbecility of lust" and "the chaos of eros." Its specific focus is his memory, eight years after the fact, of his consuming affair with Consuela Castillo, a beautiful Cuban-American student and the last of a series of younger mistresses who had assuaged his aging for more than 40 years, dating back to the early years of his long-ago (only) marriage. Kepesh's detailed anatomy (no other word will really do) of Consuela's charms stimulates brief memory glimpses of other women (some companionable divorcées of mature years, others embodiments of the swinging '60s whose boldness simultaneously delighted and puzzled him), as well as more discursive (and labored) reflections on "Lord of Misrule" Thomas Morton of Puritan Massachusetts's "Merry Mount" colony; Kepesh's tortured relationship with his middle-aged son Kenny (another victim of sex, to whom his vagrant father is a dead ringer for Dostoevsky's lustful patriarch, Karamazov pére), and—in the most potent scene here—the last hours of Kepesh's closest male friend, an adulterous poet who incarnates man the "dying animal" (a phrase from a Yeats poem) clinging to the last fumbling vestiges of the sexuality that enables him to deny death. Roth then struggles, with mixed success, to pull these strands together in the climax, which occurs on the cusp of the recent millennium, as Consuela returns to him, to confront the fact of her own mortality. "This need. This derangement. Will it never stop?," Roth's most sexually importunate figure demands of himself. Probably not—and we'll probably be treated to further ruminations on why this should be so in a future David Kepesh novel.

Kirkus Reviews

A disturbing masterpiece.”

New York Review of Books

A disturbing masterpiece.” —The New York Review of Books

“Sorrowful, sexy, elegant ... [A] distinguished addition to Roth’s increasingly remarkable literary career.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Roth is a mesmerizing writer, whose very language has the vitality of a living organism.” —The Los Angeles Times

“No one can come close to Roth’s comic genius and breadth of moral imperative.” —The Boston Globe

From the Publisher

Fans of Philip Roth are familiar with the alter egos he has created in his fiction, and are equal parts riveted and disturbed by the misogyny and intellectual equivocation those characters display. Where does Roth end and a character begin? In this short novel the character David Kepesh makes his third appearance. As he reflects on being 70, a past relationship with a 24-year-old woman, and mortality, we learn about his preoccupation with death throughout their relationship and how he is affected when she reappears years later with a life-threatening illness. Roth's pondering on matters of sexuality and mortality aren't for everyone—and as an examination of lust, the story is unsparing. Tom Stechschulte's narration is spot-on; his voice drips with pleasure, and he catches Kepesh's musings perfectly. M.W.F.T. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

OCT/NOV 08 - AudioFile