The Dying Animal
by Philip Roth
Houghton-Mifflin

Philip Roth is a machine. His last three novels, "I Married a Communist," "American Pastoral" and "The Human Stain" — a thematic trilogy evoking the ideological landscape of post-war America — have won, respectively, the Ambassador Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Roth's most recent effort, "The Dying Animal," serves as a coda to that expansive and impressive set. The trilogy was meant to show how anti-Communism, the Cold War, the hippie movement and political correctness were related as ideologies; "The Dying Animal" is meant to show their impact on the nation's sexual ethos. After all, this is Philip Roth we're talking about.

"The Dying Animal" is Roth in concentrated form. Much in the same way that Don DeLillo's recent "The Body Artist" was a slim, 124-page primer on the author's otherwise expansive prose, so too is "The Dying Animal" a short lesson in the mind of Philip Roth. You get his rambling internal monologues, his knack for casting everything in literary terms, his penchant for thrashing around at a description, throwing every angle at you, a shotgun of impressions that renders you speechless.

The trilogy's narrator is Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's sometimes alter-ego and now an aging writer living in the Hamptons. The narrator of "The Dying Animal," however, is David Kepesh, a sexually robust New York professor who made previous appearances in "The Breast" and "The Professor of Desire." The libidinous Kepesh moonlights as a public-television theater critic, and he uses his fame to lure female students into bed. The novel, written as a confession to an unidentified listener, rotates around the rise and fall of his relationship with Consuela Castillo. His previous conquests were of little consequence; he had even left his wife back in the 1960s, the better to pursue the recently emancipated, sexually liberated women who populated his classes.

But Consuela is different. She is only 24, but she is able to take control of the relationship, using Kepesh as a tool in her own narcissism, a capacity she is both adept at though wholly unaware of. She sends him into a state of internal disorder, and when she leaves him he tries to figure out just what has happened to all the easy, emotion-free sex he used to find everywhere. Unrepentant to the end, Kepesh decides that his anxiety has nothing to do with himself, but is reflective of some larger, social disequilibrium.

"The Dying Animal" is a wonderfully crafted book. Kepesh's voice is strong; and one is reminded of similar engrossing rants such as "Notes from Underground" and "The Fall." However, those who have read Roth's post-war trilogy will be left wanting for something more definitive in the way of a thematic conclusion. After all, the trilogy was supposed to be about the excesses of American ideologies; yet "The Dying Animal" doesn't have a very good sense of just how '60s-era free love and women's emancipation has affected today's young woman.

If anything, "The Dying Animal," meant as a testament to the ungraceful aging of the sexual revolution, is really a testament to Roth's own senescence. He calls them, crudely, "expert fellators," describes them as the clueless abusers of a sexual freedom wrought from the social tumults of the late 1960s. Reading "The Dying Animal," though, one gets the impression that Roth has never actually talked to a woman under 30, especially about sex. It's often hard to unwrap Roth's own voice from that of Kepesh, but it's clear that Kapesh's unease at Consuela's sexual self-control is a testament to Roth's conviction that today's young woman doesn't have any. That the sexual revolution, hailed as the unlocking of eros, has turned out to be the opening of a pandora's box of problems.

As far as his skill as a writer goes, "The Dying Animal" is at least as good as the trilogy it attempts to cap. But in terms of his attempt to cast judgment on the sexual condition of his succeeding generation, he falls woefully, even embarrassingly, flat.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)