THE DYING ANIMAL
By Philip Roth

Sex is very important to Philip Roth. At times it seems like the only thing that matters at all. For his alter ego David Kepesh, the breast-obsessed "Professor of Desire" who makes his third appearance in The Dying Animal, everything else is just a waste of time. When Kepesh, now semi-retired and a public television authority on the arts, hooks up with a student nearly forty years his junior, all thought of "the best to see, hear, and read" goes out the window. What real man wants to go to the theatre when he could be having sex? "I always wanted to fuck her right away and not have first to sit through some shitty play."

Kepesh’s consort is Consuela Castillo: "superclassically the fertile female of our mammalian species" - a Cuban-American Aphrodite with a D-cup. The ancient debate between body and soul is no contest.

Which isn’t to say The Dying Animal is anti-intellectual. In fact it is more of an essay than a novel, and one of the least dramatic works Roth has written in years. The relationship between Kepesh and Consuela is really only an excuse to string out authorial reflections on the meaning of the sexual revolution, Puritanism in America, and the millennium celebrations.

The superb sense of structure that informed the just completed "American Trilogy" (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain) is missing, and what we have instead is a wandering Portnoy-style monologue/confession. The main thesis - and since this is an essay it has a thesis - is that we can only experience freedom in sex. The rest of our lives are too ordered, stale, and routine, filled with defeat, compromise, and frustration. All of this is a living death. Only during sex "are you most cleanly alive and most cleanly yourself":

Sex isn’t just friction and shallow fun. Sex is also the revenge on death. Don’t forget death. Don’t ever forget it. Yes, sex too is limited in its power. I know very well how limited. But tell me, what power is greater?

This doesn’t seem to me to be terribly profound, or even correct. If we take it literally, sex is the revenge on death only insofar as it leads to reproduction, which Kepesh wants no part of. And taken as a metaphor it is even less convincing, since then we can only be talking about a form of art. Take the following description of Consuela’s beauty and what it means:

He too knows she is a work of art, the lucky rare woman who is a work of art, classical art, beauty in its classical form, but alive, alive, and the aesthetic response to beauty alive is what class? Desire.

A living beauty cannot be a work of art, and desire - which is either instinctual or conditioned - is not an aesthetic response. Art is the aesthetic response to living beauty, a fact that Yeats, the poet of the "dying animal" understood. Desire and seduction are the revenge on art.

Notes:
Review first published July 14, 2001.

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