The Price of Freedom

By ALAN SCHWARTZ

THE DYING ANIMAL
By Philip Roth.
156 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $23.

This short novel, or extended monologue, is a graduate seminar in the vicissitudes of Eros by the Professor of Desire—better known to readers of Philip Roth's canon as David Kepesh, a now seventyish Renaissance man. Kepesh, lured by the irresistible edenic fruit of sexual freedom in the 1960s, walked out of marriage, fatherhood and social convention into a supremely self-centered life as connoisseur, seducer of his female students and literary icon to the culturally sophisticated and morally self-justified.

A character of such obsessive narcissism would be merely banal in the hands of a lesser writer. While this book does not have the depth, complexity and originality of Roth's best work (he has, after all, won virtually every literary honor American letters can bestow, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Medal of Arts), The Dying Animal is a minor tour de force, a slim but worthy piece of Rothian candor and insight, highly sexual but with a point. Its power lies, ironically, in conveying most effectively its protagonist's weakness: to wit, the universal and primeval male predilection for sexual freedom and the avoidance of commitment.

Marriage civilizes men. Though they may squirm under its yoke, they (and society) reap its benefits. But for David Kepesh it was suffocating, a childish practice involving "forced deference" and "masochistic rigor." It was an unbearable inhibition of his irresistible desire for liberation from convention, for his own "personal revolution" to parallel that which he saw his students of the 60s so enviably and uninhibitedly carrying out. So he walked out on his wife and young son and joined up, indulging his fantasies and reveling in his solitude and his professional and artistic pursuits. Now, thirty-five years later, he has no regrets except that his graying and aging body must come to grips with its mortality.

Enter Consuela Castillo, a beautiful, well-bred Cuban-American graduate student. His relationship with her elicits unexpected feelings of jealousy and longing that threaten to undo his neatly developed worldview. How he wrestles with these unfamiliar demons, especially when the face of tragedy presents itself, makes much of the book compelling, but ultimately underdeveloped.

Another interesting figure is Kepesh's son, Kenneth, who maintains a relationship with the father who abandoned him and who remains contemptuous of his inability to accept his father as he is. But Roth allows Kenneth a good, sharp jab at the vaunted 60s and his father's choice:"...the sixties? That explosion of childishness, that vulgar, mindless, collective regression... Seducing defenseless students, pursuing one's sexual interests at the expense of everyone else... The pain you caused [Mother]...the burden you put on me...and for what? So you could be 'free'? I cannot bear you..."

The Dying Animal is a limited but worthwhile vehicle for Philip Roth's piercing articulation of human truths—about aging, about the nature and power of human relationships, about the thinking of men and of women—often hidden under protective layers of conventionality. That doesn't always make him right. But it does make him consistently original, sometimes brilliant (as well as ugly), occasionally hilarious, and never dull.