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In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in fiction, given every six years for the entire work of the recipient .
'The dying animal' is a quote from a Yeats poem. Roth's protagonist, David Kapesh, is seventy, an academic and cultural critic, who has spent a lifetime seducing his students. We have met him before in The Breast and in The Professor of Desire. Now, in his old age, he seduces a student called Consuela Castillo, the lush daughter of wealthy Cuban emigres. The jacket of the book is decorated with a Modigliani, Reclining Nude, and from Kepesh's description of her (the book is apparently told to an anonymous third party) this is an accurate depiction of her. Above all she has stupendous breasts. But, after decades of carefree libertinism, that has caused his son, aged forty, constantly to reproach him for ruining his life, Kepesh finds himself for the first time wracked with fatal jealousy: 'A young man will find her and take her away. And from me, who fired up her senses, who gave her her stature, who was the catalyst to her emancipation and prepared her for him. How do I know a young man will take her away? Because I once was the young man.' This tells you the dilemma of the narrator, but also of the reader. Essentially an old man's jealousies and waning - or waned - powers are tragic but predictable. There is an uneasy sense that this is not so much a work of art as a testament, and its honesty, compared with the tricksiness and irony of much of his work, is disturbing. Roth has exhibited in his wonderful late books a tendancy to indulge in theses about society. In particularly - American Pastoral, this worked well. Here, his views on sexual freedom and contemporary shallowness and rather banal, even slightly seedy. The Professor of Desire seems to have become the professor of prurience. There are some nasty shocks in the book, as when the generously made Consuela, long after they have parted, asks him to come and see her; she has breast cancer and is about to have a mastectomy. This seemed to me a particularly artificial turn of events. The Dying Animal is short and it has some very good things, as you would expect from Roth, but overall it is disappointing in comparison with his four previous books. (Kirkus UK)
