[In the following review, Bush compares The Dying Animal to Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and asserts that Roth's focus on private, male, sexual themes reinforces public stereotypes about his earlier works.]

Philip Roth must have known he would be pummelled for this brief, ambiguous, and disturbing sequel to his acclaimed three-volume social history of post-war America—American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). The Dying Animal's reversion to private, male sexual preoccupations goes out of its way to reinforce public stereotypes about Roth's previous work. That the novel continues his treatment of post-war culture in its principal subplot (the story of a first generation Cuban immigrant, Consuela Castillo), and that it signals a high level of narrative irony by resurrecting as its protagonist David Kepesh, the hapless hero of Roth's Kafkaesque 1970 parable The Breast, is easily overlooked.

Essentially, The Dying Animal rewrites The Human Stain's old man/young woman story in a more provocative way. Roth's need to provoke, in fact, was strong enough to make him alter his previous account of Kepesh's life. Not only does he here omit Kepesh's midlife metamorphosis into a breast—admittedly a hard act to follow—he also changes Kepesh's marital history. In The Breast and its prequel, The Professor of Desire (1977), Kepesh sired no children. The Dying Animal gives Kepesh a grown son, Kenny, long since left behind as a child of divorce. It also gives, by way of Kenny's tirades against his father, a voice to those readers who would take Roth to task for his apparent selfish hedonism.

Alas, the family-oriented Kenny himself develops marital problems, making it easier for Kepesh to mount a defense. What a defense, though. Consider: Kepesh vehemently maintains (the whole book is a long monologue to an unidentified listener) that “only when you fuck is everything that you dislike in life and everything by which you are defeated in life purely, if momentarily, revenged. Only then are you most cleanly alive and most cleanly yourself.”

Kepesh insists that American cultural history culminated in the uninhibited Sixties—“The clash between Plymouth and Merry Mount, between Bradford and Morton, between rule and misrule—the colonial harbinger of the national upheaval three hundred and thirty odd years later when Morton's American was born at last, miscegenation and all.” The Sixties, in fact, have dictated the course of Kepesh's mature life: “I took seriously the disorder of those relatively few years, and I took the world of the moment, liberation, in its fullest meaning. That's when I left my wife … I was determined, once I saw the disorder for what it was to seize from the moment a rationale for myself … to follow the logic of this revolution to its conclusion, and without having become its casualty.”

In the Sixties, then, Kepesh became a committed libertine, divesting himself of permanent attachment to be free to sleep with an ever-increasing series of consenting students. (His one nod to conventional morality was that after the sexual harassment reforms of the last decade, be prudently limited himself to students no longer under his care, whom he courts in annual after-term parties.) Hence he concludes: “Pleasure is our subject. How to be serious over a lifetime about one's modest, private pleasures.”

It is this seriousness which at the age of sixty-two leads to Kepesh's affair with Consuela, a twenty-four-year-old ex-secretary with relatively old-fashioned views about love and marriage and a strong affection for her traditional Cuban father. Kepesh becomes obsessed with her, and most particularly with “the most gorgeous breasts I have ever seen—and I was born, remember, in 1930: I have seen quite a few breasts by now. These were round, full, perfect.”

The reader be warned, however. Anytime an author decides to let his protagonist tell his own story one must expect a curveball or two. Good novelists (as in Henry James's “The Aspern Papers” or Hemingway's stories) hardly ever dispense with a narrator unless they want their readers to infer what their prolix protagonists do not. This means we have to weigh the truth of Kepesh's monologue one morally ambiguous statement at a time. And although there is admittedly nothing in the book to suggest that Roth does or does not share Kepesh's view of things, Roth's previous Kepesh books (carefully distinguished in a frontispiece from Roth's “Zuckerman Books,” his “Roth Books,” and his “Other Books”) provide a reasonably strong hint.

The adorer of Consuela's breasts in a former incarnation had found himself transformed into a female breast, as if to show us how much and how little a life devoted to passive sexual pleasure is worth. It is impossible therefore to read Kepesh's rhapsodies without irony and comedy—“The type with the nipple like a saucer. Not the nipple like an udder but the big pale rosy-brown nipple that is so very stirring.” And when Kepesh describes his yearly seductions, Roth depicts them (as in Coetzee's recent Disgrace) as, well, chilling.

I suspect that Roth modeled the presentation of The Dying Animal in part after Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, another cri-de-coeur of an unstable libertine which is by turns charming and off-putting. Dostoevsky's perhaps madman opens our eyes to every hypocrisy of bourgeois life, forcing us to agree with him even when he is most repulsive. So in Roth we find mixed with the obvious selfishness of Kepesh's attitudes subversive sallies about the nature of human sexuality that are as thought-provoking as they are uncomfortable: “[Seduction is the] comedy of creating a connection that is not the connection—that cannot begin to compete with the connection—created unartificially by lust. This is the instant conventionalizing, the giving us something in common on the spot, the trying to transform lust into something socially appropriate. Yet it's the radical inappropriateness that makes lust lust.”

With this kind of book, in other words, you never know which way to jump. But The Dying Animal demands, urgently, that we do jump, that we declare our fundamental values. For as Roth's tide reminds us, the poignance of human mortality leaves no alternative. Over the eight years rehearsed in Kepesh's monologue, we see him approach the frightening age of seventy and discover that his by-now former lover Consuela has developed cancer in those breasts with which he is still so obsessed. Confronting her diseased body at first disgusts him. As disturbing, he becomes appalled that death has threatened the woman he associates with the life force itself and whose image has comforted him about his own advancing mortality. Even if be should soon die, he has told himself, Consuela would carry on the erotic connection they had established and an order in nature would be fulfilled. This thought provides him just enough of a sense of a rational system to soften the terrors of his own aging.

Deprived of this comfort, Kepesh is thrown back on Yeats's near-despair in “Sailing to Byzantium”: “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is.” Kepesh bad earlier insisted that “Sex is … the revenge on death Yes, sex too is limited in its power. I know very well how limited. But tell me, what power is greater?” Now, he and Roth's readers are forced to consider that statement in extremis. And if Roth's irony allows that there may be in fact other answers, including friendship and human solidarity, the book's skeptical demolition of all the false comforts provided by “what Hawthorne called ‘the limit-loving class’” make us also reconsider the seriousness of Kepesh's instincts, even as we continue to regard them as outrageous.

Kepesh's observations on contemporary America fashion the book's corrosive effect. Consuela's immigrant traditionalism, for example (the stand-in for an immigrant Jewishness Roth has treated so often before) is contrasted throughout the hook with Kepesh's libertine modernity, then ultimately exploded as hollow. Though she builds a self around stories of her family's “extraordinary pride,” their steadiness, their religiousness, their aristocratic connection with an “Old World view,” their work ethic, it all proves superficial. When she discovers she has breast cancer, there is no one in her family left to turn to, and she calls upon Kepesh. Cuba, her “traditionalism,” amounts to nothing more than a social fairy tale, of no more power to console in the face of death than the identities of the “pure” Americans in American Pastoral.

Consuela's vulnerability finally sends us back to Kepesh's hedonism, for it reinforces his case against “the upholders of the norms” who create empty social forms to increase their power and control. Kepesh, like the Sixties' sexual revolutionaries he reveres, tries to remain “too playful to be indoctrinated with animus and resentment and grievance from above. They were educated in the instinctive system. They weren't interested in replacing the old inhibitions and prohibitions and moral instruction with new forms of surveillance and new systems of control and a new set of orthodox beliefs.”

The Dying Animal's contemporary edge has to do with the way it uses the terror of death to question the late twentieth century's reassuring pretenses of social identity, and with the way it tries to subvert “the limit-loving class” with the anarchic energies of a sexuality that if not a be-all and end-all at least has the promise of developing into something genuinely human. In this it shares affinities with a very different kind of book, Salman Rushdie's The Ground beneath Her Feet (1999). Roth, like Rushdie, harks back to the promise of the Sixties, even with its perversions and corruptions. More important, like Rushdie he aims to register how the uncertainties of modernity have produced both the death-like repressions of late twentieth-century Puritanism (the Talibans and the Pat Robertsons) and the identity politics on which they feed.

To quote Rushdie, amid “the uncertainty of the modern” of the last fifty years, “the ground itself seemed uncertain, the land, the physical land, seemed to cry out for reconstruction, and before you took a step you had to rest the earth to see if it would bear your weight. A great transformation was afoot.” In this situation, all but the exceptional few “have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers' seal of approval.” But these cultural “solidarities” are, to our “least-fulfilled needs” inconsequential. The truth, we read in The Ground beneath Her Feet, “leaks out in our dreams.”

As The Dying Animal ends, we hear Kepesh's interlocutor, who shares the values on which Kepesh has built his life of pleasure, pleading for him not to go to Consuela in her need. To do so would be to violate the system of his life and destroy the person he was by opening himself up to the realms of pain and suffering. In this kind of novel, we cannot be shown what Kepesh decides. Roth leaves the choice agonizingly open. But it is clear that Kepesh chooses between one kind of humanity and another. The implication is that Kepesh is about to opt for radical change, though it is a change that has nothing to do with the “false skins of those identities” that “we do not really feel”:

Don't.

What?

Don't go.

But I must. Someone has to be with her.

She'll find someone.

She's in terror. I'm going.

Think about it. Think. Because if you go, you're finished.