The tremendous power of Roth's writing is rooted in his uncanny ability to transform thought into a palpable force. Every potently composed sentence of this taut and ferocious tale--a surging confessional rant by professor and critic David Kepesh, whom Roth first conjured into existence in The Breast and The Professor of Desire and who's now a flinty 70--lands in the reader's mind like a grenade. Kepesh is recounting his infatuation with a former student, a salacious recitation that segues into a provocative critique of the consequences of the sexual revolution and a riveting debate about timeless questions of freedom, pleasure, and love. Roth is a masterful chronicler of erotic desire and obsession, and as his hero describes his helplessness before the voluptuous beauty of the well-bred Consuela Castillo, a self-contained 24 to his rapacious 62 when they first meet, he delves into everything from the extremism of the Puritans to whether or not sex is the only time "you are most cleanly alive and most cleanly yourself." Along the way, he also examines the claustrophobia of marriage, the "pornography of jealousy," the "wound of age," and, finally, inescapably, death. Kepesh may be selfish and manipulative, but Roth has imbued him with profound integrity and blazing intelligence--his riffs on sexual politics and the inanity of mass culture are not to be missed. Kepesh owns up to the tragic fact that his pursuit of personal liberty cost him his son's love, and, for all his braggadocio, he truly worships women. Virtuosic, riling, and fearless, Roth is the bard of the modern American psyche. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"...a distinguished addition to Roth's increasingly remarkable literary career." The San Francisco Chronicle
"(a) gleefully incendiary tale...whose eloquence and rage ultimately persuade us that (we)...bear the grace and the misfortune of belonging to a deeply flawed, tragically vulnerable, unavoidably mortal species." Elle
"This little book delivers a chill that you wouldn't get from a Zuckerman novel." Newsday
"In the hard, driving, unsentimental sentences, and with superb dialogue...Roth remained true to his youthful vision" Atlantic Monthly
"Powerful...Roth's narrator newly illuminates the American body, the American soul, the life of loving and the love of life that has always been so all-consuming in his fiction." The Chicago Tribune
"...insidiously disturbing and completely irresistable...All sympathetic readers will find themselves wondering: Is Philip Roth now our finest living novelist?" The Washington Post
"...the eponymous dying animal is not only a certain sort of man of a particular generation, but all of us..." Elle
"Small in size..large in insight and wisdom...Roth is spitting out brilliant novels every year. He's an American treasure." Orlando Sentinel
"...encompasses a broad expanse of human emotion and extends his stunning literary winning streak." St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"...a brilliant, demanding and splendidly artful exploration of fundamentals of literature and life" The Baltimore Sun
From the Inside Flap
No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you?re not superior to sex. With these words our most unflaggingly energetic and morally serious novelist launches perhaps his fiercest book. The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent cultural critic and star lecturer at a New York college?as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete?s critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.
The agency of Kepesh?s undoing is Consuela Castillo, the decorous and humblingly beautiful 24-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles. When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself dragged?helplessly, bitterly, furiously?into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling this descent, Philip Roth performs a breathtaking set of variations on the themes of eros and mortality, license and repression, selfishness and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger.
From the Back Cover
"No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex. With these words our most unflaggingly energetic and morally serious novelist launches perhaps his fiercest book. The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent cultural critic and star lecturer at a New York college-as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete's critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.
The agency of Kepesh's undoing is Consuela Castillo, the decorous and humblingly beautiful 24-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles. When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself dragged-helplessly, bitterly, furiously-into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling this descent, Philip Roth performs a breathtaking set of variations on the themes of eros and mortality, license and repression, selfishness and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger.
About the Author
Philip Roth (1933-2018) was one of the most decorated writers in American history, having won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, the PEN/Faulkner Award three times, the National Book Award, and many more. He also won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union and in the same year received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six years "for the entire work of the recipient."
Tom Stechschulte was an acclaimed narrator and winner of the prestigious Audie Award for Best Narration. He had been a college athlete and business major when a friend dared him to audition for a play. He got the part and traded the locker room for the dressing room, eventually taking him to New York City and to recording audiobooks.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I was no longer in that phase of my life when I thought I could do everything. Yet I remembered it clearly. You see a beautiful woman. You see her from a mile away. You go to her and say, Who are you? You have dinner. And so on. That phase, when it's all worry-free. You get on the bus. A creature so gorgeous everybody is afraid to sit next to her. The seat next to the most beautiful girl in the world -- and it's empty. So you take it. But now isn't then, and it'll never be calm. It'll never be peaceful. I was worried about her walking around in that blouse. Peel off her jacket, and there is the blouse. Peel off the blouse, and there is perfection. A young man will find her and take her away. And from me, who fired up her senses, who gave her her stature, who was the catalyst to her emancipation and prepared her for him. How do I know a young man will take her away? Because I once was the young man who would have done it
Like all Philip Roth's heroes, David Kepesh is a randy, Jewish, angst-ridden Manhattanite. The sexagenarian writes dramatic criticism, teaches, and sleeps with his female students (after the term ends, you understand)--until his obsession with luscious, young Consuela explodes in his mind. Arliss Howard impersonates Kepesh, who narrates the events and their repercussions, in an expressive but somnolent voice. He understands many of the novella's resonances, though neither he nor his producer seems to have gotten the central "joke" of Kepesh's intellectualizing everything. Numerous obvious edits jar the ear. Y.R. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
