I had given up on Roth. I was put off by Sabbath's Theater. Too much of it felt like offensive passages were just there to show Roth could get away with being offensive and people would still idolize him. That didn't work for me. I was just offended. So I started reading this book expecting more of the same. Yes there are offensive passages here but they fit in the total picture and more importantly there are insights which ring true. I'm about to approach my 79th birthday. This is the first book I've felt was full of understanding what it means to be an older male and to face the realization that much of what was possible in the past is no longer possible. Things change, you change, your outlook changes. This book captures that beautifully.

Roth often uses an alter ego as the main character in his novels, normally Nathan Zuckerman. As Roth aged he turned to another alter ego. David Kepesh, a single, older, esteemed professor of literature in a major college, sound familiar. Even more, he has a fixation on sex. This book takes that fixation to another level. Sex motivates everything he does. But rather than merely blurting out offensive material, David is much more introspective, he tells us how his conclusions come about. More importantly what he thinks makes sense. It is relatable. Your reaction is more likely to be why didn't I think of that. You identify with what he says. Fascinating.

Now to the plot. Young women are drawn to his course. He always finds one who stands out from the rest. But he has a rule. They are off limits until they finish his course. He throws a party when the course ends. At this point one is likely to throw themself at him. He's available and his combination of older guy with no attachments seems to be the right brand of honey. He barely needs to lift a finger. But the beautiful girl this year is more mature and a bit standoffish. Consuela comes from a Cuban family and knows she's gorgeous. But she's interested. She lets him know immediately she will never marry him. That interests him even more because that potential issue is off the table. Their relationship turns sexual. Very erotic. She is interested in experimenting. She is in control. Amazingly he finds himself falling in love with her. That frightens him. He was once married and found it too constraining and somewhere he never wants to go again. He's very conscious she's less than half his age, he's 62. He begins to think about ending it before she inevitably will. But he can't. They go this way for months. What ends it is when she wants him to attend the graduation party her parents are giving for her. She wants to finally show him off, he's a celebrity and he's hers. That's too much for him and on his way there he pulls over and calls her to tell her he's having car trouble and won't be able to make the party. That ends it. He never hears from her for several years.

This is where the story takes a radical turn. She calls him and lets him know she needs to tell him something, face to face. She arrives wearing a fez. Something is wrong. She tells him she's ill. She has cancer, breast cancer. She noticed a lump in her armpit. Two doctors assure her there's nothing to worry about. But another correctly diagnoses it. She has a mass in her left breast but because she has large breasts and it is deep she could never feel it. She's scared. Very scared. Chemo has not been enough. They want her to have surgery to remove the mass. Yikes. Why has she come to David? He's the only one she can talk to. She knows how much he loved her body. She is convinced she will be deformed and no one will want her body again. She has a special request. She wants him to photograph her while she still has her breasts. And she wants him to take her picture in all the sexual positions. She knows he will understand. Now we know why the book is titled The Dying Animal. He wants to be with her for the surgery. Things have changed. Where will this lead, We never find out.

I was amazed that a movie has been made based on this story. The book is very cerebral and short on dialogue so I anticipated much narration. The casting is very well done, Ben Kingsley play David and Penelope Cruz plays Consuela. David's best friend, a philandering poet, is perfectly played by Denis Hopper. I can't imagine better casting. Normally when a book is turned into a movie I expect subplots to be removed or just alluded to to save time. This is a short book so much of the story is intact. But there are some critical omissions/changes. In the book we learn of other girls before Consuela. The movie focuses on her and omits almost all the others. A critical sentence is omitted from the movie. In the book she tells David early on she will never marry him. It's omission from the movie begins to show us this is a somewhat different story. And then there's the title change. It's now called Elegy. My guess is The Dying Animal was too dark for people to greenlight. They also needed to take out some of the more explicit features like David's licking menstrual blood from Consuela's leg. They do allude to menstruation briefly as when David's long time sexual partner, brilliantly played by Patricia Clarkson, discovers a tampon that's not hers. In the movie it's unused, not so in the book. In the movie David has a darkroom in his apartment. In the book finding someone to discretely develop the pictures is a source of angst. In the book the title leads us to believe this will end badly. In the movie it ends with them returning to walk along the beach together, a much happier ending.

Both book and movie are worth your time. ( )

I don't know about this one. I picked it up from my mother's holiday home, summer-reading bookshelf for a light read. As a 57 year old male, of course I was drawn into this story of a 60+ professor who has affairs with his students - rather than remain loyally married. But it felt a more than a little lurid. And to what point? ( )

Philip Roth never fails to make me loathe his characters, and humanity in general. ( )

It comes as no surprise that Roth handles death, dying, sex, and the effects of all three on the human psyche with more honesty, more ease, than any writer this country has produced. The Dying Animal is a perfect book that accomplishes so much more in its allotted pages than the average novel in twice, three times as many. David Kepesh has come a long way from the lit student-turned mammary - oh, how breasts reprise their role! In Deception-like fashion, Kepesh tells the story to some other figure in the room about an affair unlike any other. Consuela, a twentysomething Cuban immigrant, and one of Kepesh's students, is one of the fiercest and most interesting (female) characters that Roth has invented. She's the contender in the room that has Kepesh, whose list of sexual episodes reads something like an anonymous survey of male fantasies, damn near trembling with insecurity. Roth's mastery over the series of events that has these two meet, fuck, separate, and meet again, is nothing short of brilliance. And with Dying in the title, the reader can expect this novel, in which a Casanova Jewish intellectual is caught in the middle of a war between eros and thanatos, to come with painfully beautiful Rothian meditations on the inevitable end of life. Kepesh is finished. ( )

Decadente. Sexual. DifĂ­cil. ( )