The Dying Animal

Among the primary themes of serious modern literature is, of course, the suffering of educated middle-aged males who don't get laid as much or as well as their intellectual eminence deserves. For obvious reasons this philosophical genre resonates a good deal with professional literary critics, many of whom also happen to be educated middle-aged males and perhaps in a similar sexual position.

"Brief and brilliant" according to the then-ageing Frank Kermode, the then-ageing Philip Roth's The Dying Animal certainly seems about as brief as a 160-page monologue of geronto-priapic self-pity possibly could be. While hardly engaging, it is competently told, and documents the outrage of the ageing Professor David Kepesh who, having dedicated his life to self-liberation through erotic adventure, suffers a certain deflation when he becomes unavoidably conscious of his prisoning meat and the maggots that await it.

Kepesh's memento mori is a humiliating affair with his erstwhile student Consuela Castillo, scion of a proud breed of Cuban émigrés who swallowed the American delusion to the extent of sending the federal government cheques refunding their welfare payments. A literary pundit for whom culture is a tool of seduction and music a makeshift substitute for copulation, Kepesh is casually contemptuous of Castillo's intellect: "not the most brilliant girl in the world." Nevertheless, Castillo's main reason for hating Castro seems to be that he can't throw a New Year party the way Batista used to; which at least serves to demonstrate the cleanliness and purity of her animal instincts.

Sex for Kepesh is "the revenge on death," much as endothermic metabolism is the revenge on global weather systems, I suppose. Among the handful of secondary characters (a priggishly resentful son, an irritated one-scene fuckbuddy) is a poet friend who suffers a stroke and then gropes his wife on his death-bed, though alas "he never reached her pendulous breasts." The wife's subsequent epitaph, "I wonder who it is he thought I was," may be the book's best joke.

Kepesh himself has something of a mammary fixation (he previously appeared in Roth's oeuvre as the eponymous gland in The Breast), which may give the game away when Castillo develops breast cancer. Some years after their break-up, she gets back in touch with Kepesh and asks him to photograph her, thereby simultaneously validating his purely carnal appreciation of her and sharing in his dying animality. Perhaps Roth's shrewdness in keeping Castillo's character shallow enough for some to find this plausible constitutes the brilliance detected by Frank Kermode.

A slightly, if only slightly, more interesting reading is that Kepesh has not in fact heard from Castillo since they parted, and that he is deploying literature, or anyway narrative, as his revenge on all those young and healthy bits of meat who have left him to dust and decay. There is little evidence to support such an interpretation, but with a novelist brilliant enough to title one of his works The Great American Novel it would be imprudent to discount the possibility. In any case, even poor old Colin Wilson, who thought rumpy-pumpy some sort of gateway to godhood, was rarely as ridiculous as this.