Love in the Ruins

A true writer, a great artist, is a creature of durable obsessions. Consider the essay that Philip Roth published in Commentary a little more than 40 years before “The Dying Animal.” All but forgotten now but sensational in its day, the essay has proved prophetic--for Roth.

In “Writing American Fiction,” Roth argued that reality in America had become so outsized and unreal that it “was a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination ... the actuality is continually outdoing our talents.” As a result, writers had withdrawn into themselves. They had abandoned society as a subject and taken up the matter of self, the self being “the only real thing in an unreal environment.” Such a theme, Roth wrote, could yield original results, but “at its worst,” the self-examining trend was “a form of literary onanism.” And in 1961, Roth saw the worst all around him. “We, then, I think,” he concluded dourly, “do not have much reason to be cheery.”

Maybe no one else had much reason to be cheery, but you can almost see the young writer rubbing his hands in joyful anticipation. It was obvious that Roth wasn’t denouncing a trend; he was staking out a new form of the imagination over the heads of its inadequate practitioners, and he was looking forward to his superior expertise in working it.

With the publication of “Portnoy’s Complaint” eight years later, Roth embarked on an exploration of personal identity that lasted into the early ‘90s. He split himself up into first one semi-autobiographical persona and then another: Nathan Zuckerman, the artist-hero; “Philip Roth,” the factual-fictional hybrid creator of Zuckerman; and David Kepesh, a walking experiment in the struggle to reconcile the sexual instinct with the desire for harmony and stability. Interestingly, the trilogy of novels Roth began publishing in 1995 and finished last year--”American Pastoral,” “I Married a Communist” and “The Human Stain”--breaks the self-exploring mold that Roth had perfected. They are broad, expertly detailed canvases--sometimes too broad and overloaded with obtrusive commentary--that attempt to capture the changing nature of American society and politics from the ‘50s to today. Though Nathan Zuckerman plays a role in all three books, the trilogy is almost naturalistic in style and ambition. It’s as if Roth had decided that the time was ripe for fiction to bring the self back into society.

And so a question arises: Does Roth think that American life has shrunk to the size of his imagination, or does he believe that his imagination has grown large enough to encompass the strangeness of American life? Or has his remarkable artistic mastery made him complacent about the raw actuality outside his window?

David Kepesh, who narrates “The Dying Animal,” appeared in two previous Roth novels, “The Breast” and “The Professor of Desire.” Now 70, Kepesh reviews books for National Public Radio and talks about culture on Channel Thirteen. Something of a media celebrity, he also gives a course at Hunter College in New York, “a big senior seminar in critical writing called Practical Criticism.” He lives alone, having abandoned his wife and child in the thick of the overheated ‘60s. And that’s the rub. Kepesh is, as he has always been, Roth’s test case in the limits of sexual freedom. A prodigious seducer, Kepesh tells us that he has had countless women in his life since his divorce. Many have been his star-struck students, and “The Dying Animal” is Kepesh’s account of an affair with one of them, Consuela Castillo, the stunning 24-year-old Cuban American daughter of right-wing exiles living in New Jersey. Consuela turns the professor’s life upside down.

Kepesh, 62 when the affair begins, approaches Consuela with his usual lack of sentimentality. “Having this conversation with her, I am thinking, How much more am I going to have to go through? Three hours? Four? Will I have to go as far as eight hours?” With almost clinical disapproval, he describes their sexual encounters: “I suppose she was trying to give herself over completely, but she was too young for that and, hard as she tried, that’s not what she achieved.” Yet in spite of such emotional detachment, the much older man finds himself engulfed by a jealousy that he has never felt before. This is not, however, a novel about the jealousy that fatally besets an aging man when he gets entangled with a younger woman; it is a tale about aging.

For the first time, Kepesh tells us, he feels old. But we only gradually realize how deep his anxiety is. Kepesh’s scalding attacks on marriage--there hasn’t been such a savage literary assault on the matrimonial condition since Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata”--bring out Roth’s comic genius, and this dazzling performance serves to veil Kepesh’s despair. A friend, Kepesh explains, wanted out of his marriage, “but he didn’t get out hysterically or foolishly. It was a human rights issue.” It takes us some time to gain the proper distance from Kepesh’s sincere, angry, impassioned, hilarious assaults on marriage and to realize how lonely the aging Kepesh, this “dying animal,” has become. (The novel’s title is from Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium.”)

Kepesh keeps beseeching the reader to be patient, to understand, to stay with him as he recites his tale. (Since Kepesh describes to us every detail of his recent life, public and private, it’s obvious that he is not addressing anyone he knows, even superficially. He is speaking to the reader who has read the two previous Kepesh novels.) After the death of his only close friend, a chronic adulterer named George, Kepesh confesses that he has become totally isolated, masturbating a lot, for example, while impressively, if somewhat puzzlingly, playing Beethoven on the piano. Running, as a kind of counterlife, against Kepesh’s hot disdain for the matrimonial condition are the cold consequences of his disdain.

These two warring strands inside Kepesh soon reach a stormy crescendo. Three years after the end of their affair, Consuela calls him and asks if she can come to his apartment, where she tells him that she has breast cancer. With his customary brutal unsentimentality, Kepesh relates to us his physical repulsion. But he is obviously moved, and he treats her with great tenderness and kindness. Some weeks pass, and one day, Consuela calls him from the hospital. The doctors have removed her breast. She needs him by her side. She is terrified and alone--like Kepesh. Confronted with death, a reality that exceeds his imagination, Kepesh does what Roth did in response to an American reality that exceeded his imagination: He splits himself up into two personalities:

“Don’t.’

“What?

“Don’t go.’

“But I must. Someone has to be with her.

“She’ll find someone.’

“She’s in terror. I’m going.

“‘Think about it. Think. Because if you go, you’re finished.”’

Kepesh, the Don Giovanni-like scourge of marriage, who has lost his physical desire for Consuela, who has affirmed again and again that sex is the only basis for attachment between men and women--this Kepesh is about to go to Consuela for the same reasons that, in his terms, men and women stay trapped in the prison of marriage: weakness, crippling sympathy, guilt, pity, fear, sentimentality. If Kepesh goes, he is “finished” as a free sexual being; if he does not go, his mortality will make sure that he is “finished,” dying isolated and alone--like Consuela. What, throughout the novel, Kepesh has confidently presented as a simple opposition between good and bad--between sexual freedom and stifling emotional attachment--has now literally become a matter of life and death.

Formally, the construction and development of this dilemma is a tour de force. Roth is a mesmerizing writer, whose very language has the vitality of a living organism. Yet it is a heavy disappointment to find Roth, nearing 70, still portraying the opposition between sexual freedom and emotional attachment as the preeminent conflict in life. It is not just disappointing but depressing to find at the center of this novel a 70-year-old man who, after a former lover’s mastectomy, realizes that there is (maybe) more to life than sex and that bodies simultaneously give pleasure and carry death. Roth the thinker, Roth the moralist offers little lasting sustenance. For as Roth’s style has become crystalline and mature, as his conceptual structures have become more beautiful and complex, his content has grown increasingly outmoded and banal and unfeeling.

Roth wants us to see that Kepesh’s behavior and his argument about relations between men and women, are absurdly crude and callous, but the author shares his character’s dilemma. Roth might worry, vex, undermine Kepesh’s argument, he might have Kepesh’s alienated son Kenny angrily and ineptly make all the counterarguments to Kepesh’s simplistic oppositions, but by the end of the novel, we are still left with the puerile terms of Kepesh’s argument.

Roth’s depiction of Kepesh’s only friend George on his deathbed has the strange, ineffable fusion of pathos and comedy that is found in the greatest literature. But the thematic thrust of the passage is that George wants to have (tendentious, Rothian) sex as his last act on Earth. It is like using exquisite Carrera marble to expertly carve the sculpture of a dildo. About all the many transformations and reincarnations of libido, about children or work or play or the secret unnameable sublimations that men and women create to make more supple the bonds between them, Roth is mum. Indeed, Roth’s recent trilogy documents the failure of a wide assortment of private and public American attempts to make a meaningful life. Having successfully sublimated his life into his art, Roth apparently believes that art is the only successful sublimation there is.

Worse, in “The Dying Animal,” Roth applies his simplistic opposition of self-created freedom versus convention to American society, just as he did in the recent trilogy, in which Roth’s protagonists are really versions of the artist-hero at war with everyone else. Interspersed with Kepesh’s story of his affair with Consuela are his ruminations on the perpetual American tension between puritan repression and personal liberty, which, we learn, climaxed in the ‘60s. This is not exactly original.In numerous lopsided didactic asides, which keep deforming this novel’s slender shape, Roth wants to drive home the point that the counterculture has been married to the status quo, resulting in a mechanical expression of hard-won sexual freedom. Consuela, after all, has a rather transparent symbolic dimension. She is the conventional, dutiful daughter of right-wing reactionaries who has casually and unconsciously inherited the revolutionary sexual values of the ‘60s. This theme of the status quo’s easy appropriation of the counterculture is the argument of David Brooks’ “Bobos in Paradise.” It was simplistic and obtuse in that book. Finding it as the conceptual mainspring of “The Dying Animal” comes as something of a shock.

In “The Dying Animal,” Roth is simply too in touch with the alternative universe of his oeuvre to be greatly in touch with American culture now. The most unlovely aspect of this novel is its self-referentiality. Roth is rewriting “The Breast,” a tasteless bit of shtick about a man who turns into a female breast. That 1972 tale had to do with the irrepressibility of the sex instinct. Now Roth wants to put sex alongside the irrepressibility of death. So when we read about Consuela’s breast cancer, Roth wishes us to think first of his own artistic use of the breast as literary image--reiterated again and again in this novel--and then of Consuela’s condition.

“Literary onanism” indeed. Perhaps there is purpose to the fact that someone seems to be masturbating in so many of Roth’s novels. Perhaps Roth’s portrayal of actual onanism is a kind of vaccination that he administers to his fiction in order to protect it from the disease of self-enclosure that he once condemned--and usually marvelously eluded--but that, at least for now, he seems helplessly condemned to.