[In the following review, Haskell identifies physical and emotional intimacy as key thematic concerns of The Dying Animal.]

As preoccupied as it is with the frailties of the human body, there is nothing crepuscular about The Dying Animal, Philip Roth's intense novella-length monologue. David Kepesh, a.k.a, the Professor of Desire, is back and just as in thrall to the imperatives of the flesh at 70 as he was at 21. David K, you will remember, was the Roth protagonist in The Breast (1972) who, through a “massive influx of hormones,” turned into that organ one day. His enthusiasm for it remains undiminished. The object of his lust in the new book is Consuela Castillo. When their affair began six years earlier, she was a 24-year-old Cuban-American beauty and the student of choice in his seminar on Practical Criticism.

The literary passions that inflamed Kepesh in The Professor of Desire (1977) are present, but in a somewhat corrupted state, having been converted to celebrity coinage beyond the classroom: He now does a stint as cultural commentator on PBS that draws to his course an ample supply of female groupies from which to choose each year's seducer/seducee. Acutely sensitive by this point to the under-the-table compromises in sexual couplings, Kepesh knows that without the lure of renown his 64-year-old body would not quicken the pulse of a woman in her 20s. Consuela's cultural dimness is the equivalent of Kepesh's lusterless body, her beauty the trade-off for his mind. In other words, a perfect equilibrium of the kind of shifting imbalances Roth is so skilled at describing.

But what begins with him in the driver's seat, as more loved than loving, ends in a swirl of agony and longing on his part. (Did she ever desire him sexually? What did she feel? Her unknowability grates. And excites.) Toward the end she reappears, a frightened and isolated figure needing his help. In a tantalizing conclusion, he is forced to confront the consequences of his own lifelong flight from responsibility, his pathological hunger for the new, the young, the fair, the whole. Would helping her in her hour of pain, in a state he by definition finds abhorrent, be his salvation or a betrayal of his own sacred dedication to the flesh? After all, even the most severe atheist sanctifies something, makes it into a crucible. And that is what Roth does with sexual desire at its most unredeemable and unpalatable—desire that renounces marriage, children, all those social raisons d'etre, those loving and self-ennobling links to one's fellow humans.

The profligacies and cruelties of lust, the joys of impolite, greedy lovemaking, as these are played out with a variety of mostly young, mostly willing partners, constitute Roth's literary terrain. His books, including the “larger” can vases of American Pastoral and The Human Stain, amount to a continuing epic on the subject with voluptas, or volupte, the goddess he invokes much as Homer, Virgil and Milton invoked their respective muses.

For those of us (i.e. women) who might tire of this claustrophobic focus on lovemaking with well-endowed, free-spirited babes as so much highbrow wanker porn, there are redeeming features: the humor, of course; but even more, the deeply and brutally candid self-examination, through his aging alter egos, of the ravages of time—from the humiliations of Nathan Zuckerman to the befuddlement of Kepesh. He takes us with him into each stage (them is no longer a “ready made way to be old”) that is part and parcel of the broader interest in the American landscape since the '60s, the changing of the rules whose fallout we are still trying to contain.

With its unadorned prose, its bursts of commentary and harangue, The Dying Animal sometimes feels more like notes for a novel than a full-fledged novel itself, but is no less compelling for that. Like the Ancient Mariner, Roth and his narrator (it is hard to separate the two) can't shut up: He pins you to your seat and forces you to listen. Like Casanova, he disarmingly dissects the ambiguities of his latest conquest and demystifies the gambits in seduction with a zest undiminished by time and bitter experience. But to me, Picasso is the person, the artist he most resembles in his feverish, frequently hostile engagement with the opposite sex, and the way the continual erotic charge of that love-hate duet supplies both the material and the energy that keep him going. He has a need for fresh blood, fresh disaster, out of which to carve the next satyr play, a need for an opposition between gutsy, risk-taking sex and stifling marriage, in order to propagandize for the former.

Roth has always admired and celebrated those Eastern European artists who wrote under impossible conditions and repressive regimes, warriors whose struggles made his own problems seem inconsequential. Yet he has felt, or willed into feeling, the notion of a tyranny of the flesh just as demonic and totalitarian, and as inescapably inimical to the human spirit, as any Stalinist dictatorship.

He stakes out a territory that is relentlessly male, confirming the worst nightmare of a girl's sexual education: “Every time you walk into a room of men, they are thinking of only one thing.” The girl that can fall in with that, can desire as uninhibitedly as a man, is the heroine for Roth. The Danish Birgitta in The Professor of Desire, a student named Janie in the new novel. Kepesh fondly remembers her as a happily promiscuous Long Islander, apolitical but the center of a “pleasure cell,” leader of a gang called the Gutter Girls, who carried the banner for the pot-smoking, sex-enjoying side of the '60s. Ah, yes, but where is she now? Even Kepesh has to wonder. And I wonder: From a woman's point of view, what does await that wondrous male fantasy, the bohemian free spirit; that sexual playmate who, having refused to “trap” a man into marriage, grows old in this still-unequal world?

Ambivalent toward the changes that were wrought by and in the '60s, he is primarily thrilled at what was available then and amazed that the experiment continues! (The Clintonesque Kepesh, cognizant of his good fortune exclaims, “This is a generation of astonishing fellators.”) But there is also lurking bitterness at having been born into the proper and marriage-minded '50s, and been formed (deformed, he might say) by its proprieties. Having aged, he is up against the jealousy and anxiety women feel earlier and more often: competition with younger rivals; rivalry with the memory of one's own younger self.

The misogyny of a scheming and relentless Don Juanism has always been offset by Roth's comic male self-appraisal, itself rooted in a kind of echt-Jewish sanity and common sense (represented in earlier novels by the voice of Dr. Klinger). This novel has none of the grand ambition of The Human Stain, but it has a light touch with that intricate balance of self-importance and self-mockery.

At the outset, for example, discussing his modus operandi with his female students, Kepesh confesses: “I have one set rule of some 15 years' standing that I never break. I don't any longer get in touch with them on a private basis until they've completed their final exam and received their grade and I am no longer officially in loco parentis. In spite of temptation—or even a clear-cut signal to begin flirtation. …” [Here, you think, is an admirable policy from a man with scruples, the kind of high-minded credo you've heard from any number of professors through the years. Then comes the punch line:] “… I haven't broken this rule since, back in the mid-'80s, the phone number of the sexual harassment hotline was first posted outside my office door.”

So what we have is only a dirty little boy, afraid of getting caught; a randy geezer's pragmatic and self-protective response to sexual harassment laws. Getting caught would be a major hassle. Or as he rather more elegantly puts it: He doesn't engage with female students, as pursuer or pursued, until the class is safely over “so as not to run afoul of those in the university who, if they could, would seriously impede my enjoyment of life.” No ranting against political correctness, here. The Human Stain seems to have exorcised that particular bugaboo, and David K apparently doesn't want to mope around like that novel's Coleman Silk who, after a minor slip (he innocently used the word ‘spook’), was cast out of academe. Academe is too important to Kepesh's vocation: Where else but a classroom in Eng. Lit. would he find a pool of tender beauties ripe for the plucking?

Despite the self-absorption of his protagonists, Roth gives us enough information, sufficient flashes of insight, to allow us to see both sides of the equation. The tension with a son is brilliantly portrayed in a few short pages: a young man who despises the father who abandoned him, and needs that hate to define his own sense of superiority; a father who can't share the stage with anyone, whose commitment to a doctrine of irresponsibility has cast him to the outer shores of humanity. Roth's genius is to face and express his own personal demons so fully and dramatically that they speak the collective unspoken and herald the torments of our modern age.