Novel explores professor's
life
By Megan Finnerty
Features
Editor
Women joke about men's little black books, bad
pickup lines and Viagra, but rarely do we guess how cool and plotting
men can be when trying to bed us.
Phillip Roth's new novel, "The Dying Animal," lets
us watch an aging professor plot the seduction of one of his students.
It's shocking. It's disconcerting. It's also fascinating.
We sit in the proverbial confessional next to an
aging David Kepesh, social critic and lit professor, as he details the
courtship of a goddess-like undergrad eight years ago.
Early in his career, Roth became known for writing
sharp, shocking novels — one about a man turning into a breast—
that were very much about sex and were, at the time, controversial.
Kepesh narrated several of these books written
by a young Roth, who has now returned to this character as he himself
ages.
During the '90s Roth abandoned Kepesh and other
characters that narrated more than one book and wrote a series of books
which won for him nearly every major literary prize.
Since 1991, Roth has won the National Book Critic
Circle award (again), the PEN/Faulkner Award, the National Book Award
(again) and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The White House handed him
the National Medal of the Arts in 1998.
Then came the trilogy, a collection of social wit
and criticism so forceful and shaking as to actually leave a taste in
your mouth when you finish certain paragraphs, something like sucking
on a metal spoon.
Considered Roth's masterwork, the three novels,
"American Pastoral" (1997, the Pulitzer), "I Married a Communist" (1998)
and "The Human Stain" (2000), finger the unraveling edges of the post-World
War II American Dream.
But, that was not enough.
Nearing 70, Roth returns to an ageless topic —
sex — and to Kepesh. He is unflinching in his chronicling of Kepesh's
lothario lifestyle, as last detailed in Roth's "Professor of Desire"
(1977) about sex on campus.
Kepesh, however, has now finally fallen in love
with the immaculately dressed and voluptuous Consuela Castillo. And
as she drops to her knees, she brings him to his.
He woos and wins her, but aware of his age and
deteriorating physical prowess, he becomes obsessed with possessing
her, to the point of worrying about her leaving him even as he remains
inside her for a post-coital cuddle.
Roth admits everything about how he views women,
how he views sex, what he likes and why he likes it. Kepesh is sexually
calculating in a way that makes women look twice at the men buying them
dinner.
There are sex scenes, sure, but also ones that
illustrate the crippling effects debauchery can have on families and
psyches.
It is a study of how humans age, facing loneliness
and desperation — how they brace each other for the worst and live
with themselves once it's over and even darker days lie ahead.
Readers may start and finish reading this book
in one sitting, just over 100 pages, but they won't really be finished
with the book for a long time.
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