The Dying Animal

Winner of the Man Booker International Prize

No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you’re not superior to sex. With these words our most unflaggingly energetic and morally serious novelist launches perhaps his fiercest book. The speaker is David Kepesh, white-haired and over sixty, an eminent cultural critic and star lecturer at a New York college–as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete’s critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.

The agency of Kepesh’s undoing is Consuela Castillo, the decorous and humblingly beautiful 24-year-old daughter of Cuban exiles. When he becomes involved with her, Kepesh finds himself dragged–helplessly, bitterly, furiously–into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling this descent, Philip Roth performs a breathtaking set of variations on the themes of eros and mortality, license and repression, selfishness and sacrifice. The Dying Animal is a burning coal of a book, filled with intellectual heat and not a little danger.

“[A] disturbing masterpiece.” —The New York Review of Books

“Sorrowful, sexy, elegant. . . . [A] distinguished addition to Roth’s increasingly remarkable literary career.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Roth is a mesmerizing writer, whose very language has the vitality of a living organism.” —The Los Angeles Times

“No one can come close to Roth’s comic genius and breadth of moral imperative.” —The Boston Globe