STEVEN LENZNER
BOTTUM, J.
The Dying Novel After three good novels, Philip Roth reverts to his old sex-obsessions. BY J. BOTTUM This will never do. You can measure the failure of Philip Roth's latest novel, The Dying...
...And there's the blurb from Threepenny Review that declares, "Beginning with American Pastoral in 1997, then moving on in 1998 with I Married a Communist, and continuing [in 2000] with The Human Stain, Philip Roth has engaged himself in a patriotic literary project that has no contemporary match in any field...
...I'm telling you exactly how The Dying Animal ends so you won't actually have to read it...
...Philip Roth was always a word-smith, but somewhere after Goodbye, Columbus (1959) he fell into a pit of sexual obsession that made him less interesting with each passing novel...
...But these were high points like the damp edges on either side of the slough of despond, and between them, what dreck...
...But they were all three real books, worth arguing about—and arguing for, as though the now sixty-eight-year-old Roth were the last author left in America who still remembers what the novel is supposed to do...
...You can find a hint here and there in the novel of some insight into Puritanism and the wreck that the sexual revolution produced, and a hint that love might, in old men, come at last to transcend sex...
...This is the world to which Roth has reverted with The Dying Animal...
...The Dying Animal has no such claim to comedy or interest...
...sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is...
...J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Now in his seventies, Kepesh has reverted to a man and—apparently forgetting his days as a breast—become a talking head, discoursing about books and culture on radio and television...
...But then Roth gets lost in the sex and can't get out...
...The high points of the sex-driven books he wrote before his American Trilogy were the first, Portnoy's Complaint, in 1969 (with its famous depiction of raw liver as an aid to onanism), and the last, Sabbath's Theater, in 1995 (with its concluding scene of its hero masturbating in tears over his mistress's grave...
...He's like an on-the-wagon drunkard who decides it won't hurt to stop off for one drink with his old friends—and wakes up the next morning in the gutter...
...But along the way, the book suffered serious structural problems...
...American Pastoral told the story of "Swede" Levov and the destruction the 1960s wrought on his upper-middle-class life and family, ending with the extraordinary lines: "All the voices from without, condemning and rejecting their life...
...Kepesh reappeared in The Professor of Desire (1977), an account of his young days, pre-breast, in his parents' borscht-belt hotel...
...You can measure the failure of Philip Roth's latest novel, The Dying Animal, by the comments on the back cov- _ er...
...So off he goes at the novel's conclusion to comfort his breastless mistress, with the promise that a man, even after a carefree life of sexual adventuring, can find happiness in a caring that evades, for a moment, sex...
...I Married a Communist sagged badly in the middle...
...What the blurbs on his latest novel are silent about is his latest novel itself, and you don't have to read very far in The Dying Animal, a disastrous throwback to Roth at his worst, to understand the charity of that silence...
...In other words, the blurbs on the jacket of his current book note that Roth had just finished with his previous books a trilogy of real passion _ about American history and the human condition...
...Perhaps it's damning enough simply to say that the hero of The Dying Animal is David Kepesh, who first appeared in The Breast (1972), Roth's peculiar tale of a college professor who wakes up one morning to find he's become, well, a giant breast...
...The Human Stain started out as a powerful fable of political correctness and race relations and wound down to something like a tired diatribe against the Clinton impeachment...
...It's like a bait-and-switch advertisement for radial tires: Roth hopes to lure the serious readers he regained with his American Trilogy into spending $23 for this 156-page retread—^and those readers will want to register a complaint with the Better Business Bureau...
...But all comes right for Kepesh when all goes wrong for Consuela, who calls after ten years' absence to say that she needs him to help her face the radical surgery she must have for—you saw it coming, didn't you?—breast cancer...
...And what is wrong with their life...
...You could learn something from these novels—but nothing you couldn't get better from Dante's description of the second circle of Hell: Intesi ch'a cosi fatto tormento / enno dannati i peccator car-nali, / che la ragion sommettono al talento: "I learned that to such torment are condemned the sinners in the flesh who betray their reason to their appetite...
...They weren't perfect novels, by any means...
...Through the novel he relates the story of his affair, a decade earlier, with an enormous-breasted Cuban woman named Con-suela, forty years his junior...
...But one could claim—not successfully, you understand, but at least one could claim—that there was something comically Kafkaesque about The Breast and something of an interesting Jewish coming-of-age story in The Professor of Desire...
...Their intense affair is related with the erotic frankness and funkiness at which Roth has always aimed, and it ends when Kepesh, raging with jealousy at the possibility that a younger man will steal Consuela, preemptively breaks away from her—and spends the next ten years bemoaning it...
...There's the blurb from the Times Literary Supplement that acclaims Roth's three prior novels for the "radical individualism" of which they were, in fact, the greatest denunciation recent fiction has produced...
...What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs...
...The novel's title is borrowed from "Sailing to Byzantium," Yeats's poem about being old: Consume my heart away...
Vol. 6 • July 2001 • No. 40
