[In the following review of The Dying Animal, Toynton argues that Roth fails to fulfill the potential within his characters and story, resulting in a disappointing book.]

After the triumph of his wide-ranging, hyper-energized post-war trilogy, Philip Roth has written a short, spare novel [The Dying Animal] with a much narrower compass, a book that might be called an ageing artist's meditation on sex and death—except it does not live up to that description. “Lust and rage … dance attendance upon [the] old age” of Roth's narrator, to borrow a phrase from Yeats (from whom the novel's title is also taken); it is too bad that the song into which they spur him is merely a sourer version of one we have heard from Roth before: the one about sex as the ultimate liberation into the self, the suffocations of marriage and the heroic defiance involved in refusing its hypocrisies.

We have also met David Kepesh, the narrator of The Dying Animal, before—freakishly transformed into a huge mammary gland in The Breast, fiercely torn between carnal and other longings in The Professor of Desire. In his latest incarnation, however, Kepesh, now seventy, has been provided with an entirely new life history (including a marriage he broke away from in the 1960s to go in search of sexual delight, for which the son of that marriage, now middle-aged, has never forgiven him). He also seems to have lost his former capacity for tenderness.

The centrepiece of the novel is Kepesh's affair, eight years earlier, with Consuela Castillo, a twenty-four-year-old Cuban-American from the New Jersey suburbs—“conventional … well-spoken, sober”. Consuela's attractions are wholly erotic, chief among them the fact that she has “the most gorgeous breasts … round, full, perfect” Kepesh has ever seen. Kepesh, by now a minor celebrity as a cultural commentator for public television, has been teaching a single course at a university in New York for years, and has worked out an efficient modus operandi for the seduction of one desirable student each year. But Consuela, unlike all the others, becomes an obsession; terrified that someone else—someone younger, someone she can desire—will steal her away, he is racked by jealousy even when she is there with him, even when they are in bed together.

It is a situation with potential for both humour and pathos, and one can imagine Roth mining it brilliantly. But alas, that is not what happens. Consuela remains a sketchy presence—her conversation sounds generic in a puzzlingly unRothian way, and being told that she “dresses like an attractive secretary in a prestigious law firm” does not bring her to life on the page. Worse still, Kepesh himself is such a shallow character that even his narcissism doesn't go deep enough. His panegyrics to the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the ground-breaking promiscuity of various young suburban females back then (who “knew how to operate around engorged men … a generation drawing their conclusions from their cunts about the nature of experience and the delights of the world”), his detailed descriptions of his seduction methods and sexual encounters, his self-justifying harangues about his abandonment of his wife and son, above all his jeers at his son's “imprisonment” in marriage, are finally less bold and provocative than plain embarrassing. Surely a seventy-year-old should have more dignity than this, or at least see more deeply into things, especially a seventy-year-old who is so very “cultured”, whose love of Kafka, Beethoven, Velázquez is insisted on throughout the book.

At the end, Consuela returns after an absence of five years, and the novel's—as well as Kepesh's—final chance for redemption presents itself: she announces that she has breast cancer. So it is the beautiful young woman, not the old man, who is the dying animal after all: what could be more poignant than that? If Kepesh could desire her after hearing such news, if he could make love to her mortality, it would be a very different kind of liberation. But he cannot manage it. What happens instead seems like unintentional farce, a failure of the imagination, as though Roth cannot conceive of a woman seeing herself as anything except the object of men's desire. He has done so much better in the past, with female as well as male characters, that it would be wrong to draw any far-reaching conclusions. All one can say is that The Dying Animal is the first not-dazzling novel Philip Roth has published in years.