Intimacy - a revenge on death
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As noted author Philip Roth has gotten older, so have his main characters, which lead to the themes of aging, death, and diminished capabilities that now predominate in his novels. David Kepesh, a noted NYC university professor, conducts a senior seminar in critical writing called Practical Criticism. The course is a chick magnet which accords perfectly with Kepesh's near obsession with beautiful younger women. He has an uncanny ability to know which girl in a class is predisposed to becoming intimate with him at the conclusion of the course.
Kepesh had led a conventional life through the 1950s, including being married. But he was profoundly affected by the revolutionary openness of the 60s and was determined to escape a past where men were forced to "cajole, beg, flatter, or insist" on intimacy. It was a time when neither men nor women "had any sense of an erotic birthright." In his view, marriage for men was "like priests going into the Church: they take the vow of chastity, only seemingly without knowing it until three, four, five years down the line."
At age sixty-two, Kepesh is totally stunned when twenty-four-year-old Consuela Castillo, an elegant, buxom beauty, shows up in one of his seminars. She becomes his mission in life. At first glance, his dealings with his selected female students seem completely exploitative or one-sided. However, in his view relationships are "not fifty-fifty like a business transaction. It's the chaos of eros we're talking about." There is not much doubt that his relationship with Consuela over the next year and half demonstrates clearly her power advantage. "To give oneself over intimately to a much, much older man provides this sort of younger woman with authority of a kind she cannot get in an arrangement with a younger man. She gets both the pleasures of submission and the pleasures of mastery."
But having a relationship with such an exquisite creature is not unproblematical for Kepesh. The inescapability of her youthfulness and his aging are always present. The worry that it could all end suddenly engenders a scarcely concealed jealousy, as well as a tendency to want to precipitate an early end to the affair. However, for Kepesh, such intimacy is "the revenge on death. Don't forget death. ... Yes, intimacy is limited in its power. But tell me, what power is greater?" One wonders whether Kepesh is going to have some adaptability issues when he truly becomes elderly.
For many, Kepesh's obsessions may seem disgraceful; obviously different avenues are chosen by other older individuals to keep feeling alive. But such a response does not delegitimize the work. Kepesh clearly demonstrates his humanity in his behavior towards Consuela some eight years later when she calls upon him for support in her battle against a serious form of cancer - hardly the actions of one who felt taken advantage of. Roth continues to be a writer that explores so well the disconnect between our prurient interests and our social constructs that constrain our abilities to achieve satisfying intimacy. Kepesh is a character that has tried to bridge that gap about as well as is possible.
The Dying Animal: Roth's Cuban Mistress Crisis.
Customer Rating: Best known for Goodbye, Columbus, Portnoy's Complaint, and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, American Pastoral, Philip Roth's introspective 2001 novella, The Dying Animal, tells the poignant story of Jewish intellectual, David Kepesh, a celebrated literature professor, who is inacapable of understanding the meaning of emotional commitment. The Dying Animal is the third in a trilogy of Kepesh novels; the preceding two novels are The Breast (1972) and The Professor of Desire (1977).
The Dying Animal is a profound meditation on life, love, loss, and death told in Philip Roth's characteristic style. Kepesh was a promiscuous professor at New York College with an obsession for women's breasts. He is a womanizer who worships women. He abandoned his family to pursue his sexual desires without emotional entanglements. Now in his 70s, he remains vexed by a purely sexual relationship he had at age 62 with a voluptuous, 24-year-old Cuban student, Consuela Castillo, knowing at the time that this relationship could indeed be his last. What makes this novel so poignant is that eight years after their sexual liason, Consuela informs Kepesh she has breast cancer, transforming this story from a tale of intense eros into a deeper lesson on mortality. Roth's novel was recently adapted into a 2008 film, Elegy, starring Ben Kingsley as David Kepesh and Penélope Cruz as Consuela Castillo. The Dying Animal attests to Philip Roth's rare genius as a writer. Highly recommended.
G. Merritt
A history of 20th-century sexual America
Customer Rating: I think you have two choices when reading this book: be utterly horrified, or take it as a succinct bit of honesty about sex. Which you choose will depend, in all likelihood, on whether you're a woman or a man. Many women will see it as rank misogyny. I don't begrudge them that belief. I happen to think, on the contrary, that it is an absolute masterpiece. It does for the sexual revolution what Roth's American trilogy -- American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain -- did for the rest of mid-to-late-twentieth-century American history: condense it down and focus its agonies on one man.
Here the representative for 20th-century America is David Kapesh. Others will have met him in Roth's earlier novels, The Professor of Desire and The Breast; I've not read those, so I can't comment. In The Dying Animal, we meet Kapesh in his early seventies, a famous cultural critic who appears on public television every week, book in hand, white mane flowing and (one presumes) turtleneck up to his chin. He is an enthusiastic participant in the sexual revolution. It seems as though every semester he picks one new student to seduce after classes are over -- for sex, nothing more. This is just a meeting of flesh and flesh: everyone is aware of the game that everyone else is playing.
This contract alone leads into the book's heart, which is a lecture on and a demonstration of what sex used to mean for someone of Kapesh's generation, what it means now, what changed, and how much we've forgotten about the revolution. In Kapesh's youth, "heavy petting" was a stage one got to after endless courtship; anything more would have horrified his parents, had they known. Without going into detail (this is a family publication, after all), we take substantially more contact for granted. As Kapesh notes, today's youth believe that absolute sexual freedom arrived along with the Declaration of Independence; we think it's a fundamental human right, as natural as the water we drink. Kapesh reminds us that in order to move from the era of heavy petting to this sexual anarchy, sexual anarchists had to set fire to a lot of taboos: like anything else that we take for granted, today's casual lifestyle was yesterday's struggle.
During that struggle, Kapesh was an awestruck participant. He wasn't young enough to take the struggle in stride and accept it as part of his being; he was a mature man, already a married college professor, who saw the revolution for what it was and decided to dive right in. He lost a wife and child during the battle, but he knew what he was getting into and what he'd be giving up.
When he gave it up, a lot of what passed for sexual certainty in the society was revealed to be hollow convention. Get married so that he could have unsatisfying but officially sanctioned sex with his wife, meanwhile yearning for the acres of supple flesh that attended his classes every semester; pretend that the omnivorous male inside could be locked away inside a socially respectable façade.
His son never forgives him. To prove that he's so much more decent and moral than his father, he gets his girlfriend pregnant and promptly marries her. Tell her to get an abortion, Kapesh tells him. If she refuses, that's not your problem -- the sexual revolution made her a freestanding sexual being and it did the same to you. The son marries her anyway. When he goes on to have an affair a few children later, he has to endow that affair with social respectability: the girl is sweet and loving and intelligent and writes poetry and has wonderful parents. Kapesh can only stare with scorn: you're trying to camouflage a transaction involving meat. Why pretend that you are anything other than you are? Why lacquer sex with the social respectability that my generation so feverishly cast off?
The son is devastated, but keeps returning to his father, whom he loathes. He needs to parade his respectability before his enemy, but at some level he probably also respects the choice that his father made. In this conflict between father and son, we have three generations of American sexual understanding: the father as a youth (sexual expectation: years of courtship followed by wedding followed by sex), father as grown man (the sexual revolution presents a world of limitless, dangerous possibility), and son as a grown man (trying to reassemble some sexual order after a generation of anarchy).
Into Kapesh's life comes Consuela, a Cuban student born into the anarchy, but standing outside of it. She is beautiful and (it's important to the story) buxom, but she's kept aloof from the many men who presumably desired her. She can take or leave Kapesh, and this fact drives him crazy. For once he needs control -- needs to regain the order that he enthusiastically disposed of; to know that he can't control her, and that some other man can take her away, sends him into spasms of jealousy. In one rather graphic scene, he throws away all his self-control and lets the anarchy destroy him. Consuela is the agent of his destruction, but stands hautily by while it happens.
All this in not much more than 100 large-print pages. It is the most brutally honest book about sex you will probably ever read. It is an unqualified masterpiece.
