Rating: 
Summary: What struck me is the hypocricy
Review: A friend of mine warned me I could not handle this book, but I read it, anyway, and I found I could not only handle it, but I had much to gain from the insights. First, of course, is the obvious juxtaposition between youth and old age, the fleetingness of one and the wisdom (or perceived wisdom) of the other. But what caught my eye was all the hypocricy. (Hypocrisy? Darn the spelling!) For example, David Kepesh, our narrator, bemoans the fact that his beautiful and youthful Consuela has had other lovers, then blythly reveals that even as he is seeing her, he is seeing someone else. (After all, HE can have the freedom the 1960s promises, but what about everyone else?) As for his son, the hypocricy is so glaring, I'll let you read about it for yourself. For a small book, this packs a powerful punch, and I especially like the powerlessness of Kepesh when he is on his knees in front of Consuela, but again, you'll have to read that for yourself.
What is not clear, though, is why Consuela holds so much power over him. She may have a perfect body, but Kepesh seems to want something more from his women. Then again, maybe he is that shallow.
Rating: 
Summary: A novel or an essay? Roth continues to inquire & provoke.
Review: Here Roth examines the issues connecting sex and death with same vigor that he applied to his most recent trilogy. This short book lacks the scope and the balance of American Pastoral, but instead aims with a laser-like intensity upon its themes. I disagree with some of the other reviewers who argue that the narrator is a stand-in for the author, thought I can understand how you can be swayed by the passion in Kepesh's voice. Here Roth continues to perfect his technique of having the narrator persuasively argue a point, only to have another character give an equally strong opposing argument several pages later. As in the best of Roth's earlier work, he builds and subverts the hero's philosophy with equal force, leaving the reader to ponder the 'truth' or absence thereof. The first-person narrator in this book lets Roth get away with a lot of what could be construed as sloppiness here. Some thinly developed characters, frustrating holes in the timeline, and occasional inability to follow ideas through can all be chalked up to the fallibility of the narrator (if you are feeling generous). Yes, Roth continues to experiment with form and structure. Yes, he continues to dare us to hate his protagonist. And yes, he brings us almost grotesque scenes of sexuality. This book is flawed, and occasionally annoying. Yet, as you can see from my 5 star rating, I feel that the humor, anger, insight and courage contained in its 156 pages are unique and make this book essential, in a way. Besides, it contains what may be the definitive description of New Years Eve 1999.
Rating:
Summary: Written like a private diary
Review: I don't explain plots. Read any other review, you'll get a good idea what the book is about. I'll comment on Philip Roth's writing which is lean and mean. The way he has created David Kepesh reminds me of reading someone's private diary. While reading The Dying Animal I continually thought how simple and pleasurable and complicated life could be. I enjoyed The Dying Animal very much. Philip Roth does not disappoint. He could write about anything and make it good reading.
Rating:
Summary: The surprises of the affair
Review: I have read much of Roth's oeuvre, but this book was intriguing in a different way than many of his other books. Roth always offers interesting insights into relationships that are apart from typical and accepted moral views held by most Americans. For myself, this is refreshing. In this particular book, Roth enters the inchoate stages of a dialogue concerning what an affair can become, the fact that it is a series of moments rather than one long relationship, and that it can involve more than sex.
This is not a book I would recommend to all readers. Rather, this is a book to be selectively read by those who fall into the same category as the best friend of David Kepesh (the main character of the novel), who Kepesh claims within the novel to be the only friend who did not morally judge Kepesh's actions or attempt to present him with a pious or self-righteous attitude. For those who can withhold judgment, this is a marvelous, insightful novella that speaks not only about lust, but about beauty, age, and mortality.
Rating:
Summary: Disturbing Yet Riveting
Review: I have to say The Dying Animal broke no real new ground in the "Lolita" genre, and in typical Roth fashion, nothing really happens in the book, as he pretty much tells the story in first person past tense as if he were on a couch talking to a shrink. In short, he breaks every rule writers are advised to follow and the result is exactly what The New York Review of Books hails "A Disturbing Masterpiece." It is a perfect example of why I bypass the best seller table at any bookstore I patronize. It is an ugly story about a pathetic character and yet, because of Roth's ability to tell a story, I found myself unable to look away, and when I closed the cover for the last time I found myself unable to refrain from thinking about the book and how it left me feeling, and it made for quite a discussion with my girlfriend, to whom I'd read aloud several passages and who'd scanned the book cover to cover herself. Is it any wonder Roth has won just about every writing award, including the Pulitzer?
Rating: 
Summary: Wallflower at the revolution
Review: I read Philip Roth's first few books then missed a couple of decades. Upon joining an online discussion group I read this book and find he has become just another old goat looking for young poon. Is he vying for that rascal Henry Miller`s mantle as Dirty Old Man of American Letters? I know that art can be about anything but an essay on the changes in society over the last forty years would have sufficed. Like many Woody Allen fans I prefer the older, funnier work. Roth is a fine writer and unlike some best selling authors he does have a lot to say. I just could not get past the story of a twenty year old entering into a liaison with a senior citizen. As young coeds in the sixties, my friends and I would never entertain such thoughts about even the youngest instructors. "He must be at least thirty and probably married." We had plenty of callow frat boys buzzing around who didn't know anything about anything and it suited us just fine. Attending college in Canada, the Vietnam War did not really affect us except for the occasional kid with a Yank accent panhandling on the street. Draft dodgers. We kept our distance because American boys had a reputation for being fast..... By the seventies I was safely married sat on the sidelines during the devolution of the freedom movement into the disco era. That generation jettisoned the ideology and kept the drugs. A writer of Roth's stature would have no end of groupies willing to sit at his feet or do anything else he wanted. It was amusing when he invoked the US Constitution to bolster his case for doing exactly as he pleased. Rogering as an Inalienable Right. His alter ego in the book is not an altogether hopeless case. Anyone as erudite and cultured as David Kepesh cannot be all bad. I found it endearing that he persisted with his piano playing even though he kept hitting wrong notes. He was truly attached to his friend George and went out of his way to make his last days meaningful even though it was an exercise in futility. We are all wary of being smothered by the very people from whom we seek comfort. Intimacy is fraught with danger. But being alone has pitfalls as well as pleasures. Having a peek beneath David's detached exterior it gives the reader hope that he will extend himself to the ailing Consuela. The affair that caused him to regress into adolescent jealousy and possessiveness may enable him to finally grow up. He only has to take the opportunity to redeem himself.
Rating:
Summary: Satisfying Coda to Roth's "American Trilogy"
Review: It's useful to think of "The Dying Animal" as a coda to Roth's magnificent trilogy of books on post-war America--"American Pastoral", "I Married a Communist", and "The Human Stain." It functions much the same way as "The Prague Orgy" did as that novella summed up his earlier "Zuckerman Bound" trilogy. The themes of the earlier books are cast in unexpected new ways that show even more light. The protagonist of this new book is Kepesh, not Zuckerman, but the preoccupations of this book are the same as the American trilogy--how do you reinvent yourself like a good American who can supposedly just shuck off the past; what is the price you pay for that spiritual reformation (or deformation.) This David Kepesh's history is somewhat altered from the Kepesh of "The Breast" and "The Professor of Desire"; he now has a middle-aged son who hates him and one somewhat shadowy ex-wife who he abandoned during the sexual upheaval of the 60's. Otherwise he remains the same; a hedonistic moralist intoxicated by female beauty (especially breasts: he loves a voluptuary Modigliani painting of a female nude that appears on the jacket of this novel.) In his sixties he begins an affair with Consuela, a decorous young Cuban-American woman who presses all the right buttons for the aging professor. Intertwined with the story is a marvelous debate on the meaning of the cultural revolution of the '60's and '70's. Kepesh is predictably king-hell for freedom, but his son is a constant unwelcome reminder of the damage done. One again as in "Operation Shylock" and the American trilogy Roth brilliantly shows a man tearing himself in two trying to "break on through to the other side", to a life without history and consequences. Once again Roth shows us that he can write an English sentence better than anyone else. Again we get his excruciating, tragic, comic self-indictment. For at the end it turns out that Consuela needs Kepesh in a most desparate, life-or-death sense and Kepesh is forced to confront the fact of her not as just a breast, not as his somewhat dim little girlfriend (as he thoughtlessly sees her) but as a human being in terrible trouble. The final pages as as harrowing as anything Roth has written. This book, by the greatest living American writer, is required reading for lovers of American fiction.
Rating:
Summary: Roth, distilled to his most powerful essence
Review: Roth fans, students of serious literature, and those interested in a glimpse into the aging male psyche should truly enjoy this gem of a book. Roth proves his stature as one of America's greatest living writers by, in the mere span of roughly 150 large-type pages, offering insights into subjects such as man's intellectual nature versus man's sexual nature, Puritanism, academia and political correctness, the Sixties, marriage and family, mortality, and the randomness of fate. One could go on and on describing the many attributes of this book, but in the spirit of Roth's pithiness, I will just say: "read it!"
Rating: 
Summary: The Elderly Adolescent and His Angst
Review: Scanning this book as my other half poured over it with disarming fascination, I had to peek into what had so mesmerized him. After all, I hadn't read a Roth novel since my early 20's, already at that young age having determined that there was nothing here but adolescent angst. And this dying animal? Ah, but I had been right to not bother all these years and with all the in between novels. The story was quite the same one. This time the difference was only one of age. A Roth version of Lolita, an elderly man obsesses over a young woman who couldn't possibly care less, except for the intoxication of her power over the old wretch. Been there, read that. Has he nothing new to say? Even as my partner and I swam into ever deeper waters of discussion, my presentation of the woman's perspective, his from the side of the aging man, I had to concede that Roth has the technical skills of good writing well in hand. It takes small talent to write action; it takes skill to write about nothing, and still he moves the reader along. This does indeed read like a confession, an emotional purging, and it is done well enough, but to earn a Pulitzer, there must not only be skill, but substance as well. No prize here. If one other point is earned, I give it for title. So precise, so right, this title is a masterstroke in itself. Aside from that, spare me such men, spare me such novellas. I wish only such skill might have been used to tell more than one story, as Roth appears to have only one to tell.
Rating:
Summary: The Old Man with the4 Breast Fetish
Review: There seems to be just one main theme for Vidal - one he comes back to again and again: SEX. As the author ages, so does the protagonist professor David Kepesh, age seventy and telling a story of eight years ago. At the center of the story is Consuela Castillo, of Cuban descent and then 24 years old. She has the most perfect female form, magnificent large breasts, an almost translucent white skin and black hair. She is just simply perfect, also in everything she does. This liaison lasts about a good year, stopping abruptly. Some years later, Kepesh gets a call from Consuela, who needs his help and understanding. She has breast cancer, already lost her hair and will now lose one of her breasts. Roth mainly writes about the juxtaposition of old age and youth. He finds that youth has its advantages, but they are not guaranteed. Consuela's youth and perfection are being destroyed, while Kepesh lives on. There is a lesson hidden here somewhere, and the lesson has to do with old age surviving. And that beauty is not reliable.
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