The story of their affair is told by Kepesh to an unidentified young friend, in a monologue that easily breaks into other voices—it’s structurally very like The Fall, or like Portnoy addressing his psychiatrist—after Consuela reappears in his life. She is sick and seeking comfort. The girl with the most beautiful breasts in the world has breast cancer. She has already had chemo and is facing surgery. Since her father has died in the intervening years, and her mother is too upset to help, she has come to see her old lover, for just a few hours. She wants him to admire her breasts again, and to photograph them. It is New Year’s Eve when she shows up, the turn of the millennium. (Kepesh imagines her “too miserable and frightened to go to the party where she’d been invited and too miserable and frightened to be alone.”) But after this visit, three weeks pass. She doesn’t come again. He doesn’t know how to reach her. Throughout this one-hundred-and-fifty-six-page monologue—this tract about sexual freedom—he is waiting, anxiously, for the woman to call.
Female critics, in particular—but not exclusively—were infuriated with Kepesh, with his attitude toward women, and especially with his emphasis on Consuela’s breasts. Is this what men love women for? (What kind of men?) Does Roth even know what love is? Why does he insist on wasting his beautiful prose on such puerile stuff? Zoë Heller, in The New Republic, wrote that “given his history, Kepesh would have to down several tankards of menstrual blood before carping would be in order” and complained that Roth’s depictions of sex throughout his work amounted to no more than “a serial case study in the vagina dentata complex.” Michiko Kakutani, in The New York Times, wrote that Consuela was “portrayed in highly patronizing terms,” and Adam Mars-Jones, in The Observer, noted that she is “described alternately as if she was a zoo specimen and an art object.” The book’s strongest defender, Keith Gessen, in The Nation, declared straight out that “in his old age Roth has become Tolstoy”—because of the scope of his recent novels and because of his urgent need to communicate his particular truths, even to the point of forsaking his literary instincts in the process. For Gessen, The Dying Animal is more an essay than a work of fiction, yet valuable in the depths of meaning that it adds to Roth’s previous work.
It’s not difficult to understand the anger that Kepesh provokes. Roth seems at times to court it, as he courted the wrath of the rabbis, the Times critics, and the feminists. The Dying Animal is a blunt and unbeguiling work. If Kepesh has a virtue, it is his clinical, wholly unpoetic honesty, and he is principally honest about his sexual nature and all that he’s done to stay clear of emotional attachments. He doesn’t want to be good; he wants to be free. He doesn’t dispute his ex-wife’s assessment of his character. Except for George O’Hearn, he has no male friends—Kepesh’s friends are his ex-girlfriends—since most men choose very different lives. “I am ‘a limited man,’ they tell me—they who are not limited.” (On the subject of married men, Kepesh gives as good as he gets: “Their heroism is not only in stoically enduring the dailiness of their renunciations but in diligently presenting a counterfeit image of their lives.”) He doesn’t ask for sympathy. He knows very well that “I don’t universally compel admiration.” But it’s one thing to say that Kepesh is limited or unlikable and another to say that he’s unreal, or doesn’t represent something real. Kepesh makes a specialty of saying things one should not say. And if only for this, it’s worth listening to him.
Age has made Kepesh obsessive about everything that he will lose, including Consuela. Seeing her through his eyes is nothing like seeing Faunia Farley through Coleman Silk’s: Consuela is an engaging presence—her voice has the old-fashioned lilt of her upbringing—but Kepesh is essentially blinded by her beauty, and he knows it. Racking his tortured brain to figure out how she has so affected him, he concludes, “Like a great athlete or a work of idealized sculptural art or an animal glimpsed in the woods, like Michael Jordan, like a Maillol, like an owl, like a bobcat, she’d done it through the simplicity of physical splendor.” Is this demeaning? To her? It’s an odd time we live in, surrounded by commercial images of youth and beauty—magazines, billboards, television—but in which literary accounts of beauty’s power are found objectionable. True, Kepesh is not Baruch Spinoza. He is a man deeply bound up in the flesh. But he is not inhuman: when he learns that Consuela is sick, he is stricken by the thought that she has been alone and panicking. He worries that he might not be able to get an erection if she comes back to him, maimed. And he can’t stop picturing a double-nude portrait, by Stanley Spencer, of the artist and his wife, in their mid-forties, just beginning to sag and slacken, and posed with “uncharitable candor” beside two pieces of raw meat, as if they were all in the same butcher shop window. Even the description is enough to make one want to turn away. And if only for this, it’s worth looking.
There’s an interesting contrast to Kepesh’s experience in Alice Munro’s celebrated story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain.” Munro offers a portrait of one of the most indisputably loving husbands in modern fiction, a man who is devoted to his wife through old age and her descent into Alzheimer’s, yet who also happens to have been, in his younger years, a compulsive philanderer. Indeed, he’s a professor who was lured off the conventional path by the sexual free-for-all of the sixties, and saved from destroying his perfect marriage only by the growing vigilance of campus watchdogs and bewilderingly irate feminists. (As Gide’s immoralist puts it, “Who’s to say how many passions and how many warring thoughts can cohabit in a man?”) Kepesh takes the path of the sixties in the opposite direction—a path that few have followed to its destination or have even asked exactly what that place might look like. Dedicated to following “the logic of this revolution to its conclusion,” and to turning “freedom into a system,” he has made his life into a radical experiment. And, like other radically “pure” systems that Roth has considered in his work, it is bound to fail:
The great propagandist for fucking and I can’t do any better than Kenny. Of course there is no purity of the kind Kenny dreams of, but there is also no purity of the kind I dream of … This need. This derangement. Will it never stop? I don’t even know after a while what I’m desperate for. Her tits? Her soul? Her youth? Her simple mind? Maybe it’s worse than that—maybe now that I’m nearing death, I also long secretly not to be free.
Personal freedom also has its price, even for a man who slips “her soul” between “her tits” and “her youth” as though that were the embarrassing part of his confession.
These are the major concerns in what remains a minor book—and a flawed one. It hardly matters that Kepesh’s personal history, related in The Breast and The Professor of Desire, doesn’t match the history he is given here; he is given what he needs to tell this story. Or that, as the critic Mark Shechner has pointed out, no self-respecting, conservative Cuban parents would have named their daughter Consuela; the proper Spanish name for a woman is Consuelo. But even on its own terms, the book has shaky patches. There’s a hurriedness that leads to awkwardness in the crucial scene of Consuela’s return, when Kepesh is alarmingly quick (even for Kepesh) to ask to touch her breasts; it doesn’t seem that this moment is meant to get a laugh. And there’s an occasional digression that feels out of place or tonally flat: Kepesh’s comparative analysis of the allure of a woman who has taken off her bra but not her skirt versus one still wearing only pants seems not so much frank as jarringly unbalanced when the woman undressing has just confessed to having cancer. Are these failings of the character or of the execution? Roth was, indeed, in a hurry to say what he had to say; The Dying Animal was published in the spring of 2001, just a year after The Human Stain. The voice is propulsive and close, and if there’s an occasional translated European feel to the locutions, that’s because lines like “She asked me to tell her about the beauty of her body” hardly seem possible anymore in an American book.
The country’s sexual history is woven through the lives of the lesser characters, too. There’s Janie Wyatt, a gypsy-costumed campus
heroine of the sixties—a leader of “the first wave of American girls fully implicated in their own desire,” part of the generation responsible for the sexual rights that women like Consuela take for granted. Janie is less a character than a symbol, though, like Delacroix’s Liberty rushing forward with her breasts exposed; Roth, for all his championing of the revolution, deals best with people damaged by its failures. (In general, success is no more compelling for Roth, as a subject, than virtue.) A former girlfriend, Elena Hrabovsky, is a respected ophthalmologist, a kindhearted woman who is approaching middle age and wants to have a family but can’t bear the boredom and humiliation of dating. “I sit there thinking, Please, Lord, just let me go home,” she tells Kepesh; “It’s rough out there, David.” He is surprised to learn that several of his women friends have resorted to professional matchmakers, because the men they generally meet are “narcissistic, humorless, crazy, obsessional, overbearing, crude, or they are great-looking, virile, and ruthlessly unfaithful, or they are emasculated, or they are impotent, or they are just too dumb.” No contradictory argument is made or evidence introduced. The upshot seems to be that marriage is one form of hell, but the postrevolutionary sexual situation can be another. Pick your poison.
The wife of one such “ruthlessly unfaithful” man makes a particularly vivid impression, even though she has only one scene and barely more than a single, if revelatory, line. George O’Hearn’s wife, Kate, is in attendance at his deathbed, along with their grown children. Roth describes her as an imposing, white-haired woman, “attractively roundish, wry, resilient, radiating a kind of stubborn heartiness,” yet profoundly worn down—whether by George’s life or George’s death he doesn’t say. George himself, lying semi-paralyzed after a stroke, summons his wife to his bedside and begins to kiss her passionately—she returns the kisses—and then to fumble with his one good hand at the buttons of her blouse. Despite the presence of the family, their daughter calls out to Kate to assist him, and she does: first the buttons on the sleeves, then down the blouse’s front. George is grasping at the cloth of her brassiere when he suddenly falls back on his pillows, breathing fast, his final act on earth cut short. It is a grand, touching, almost Victorian scene of the dying profligate redeemed. Immediately afterward, Kate, walking Kepesh down the driveway to his car, coolly deflates the drama, saying, with a weary smile, “I wonder who it is he thought I was.”
Of course, Kepesh is no longer the man he thought he was. The ultimate lesson for the breast-obsessed connoisseur of female flesh is that he desperately wants to be at Consuela’s side, even if the surgery means that she is about to lose her breasts entirely. Does this mixture of Eros and tenderness amount to love? The better question, surely (the Tolstoyan question), is: how long can it last? The Kepesh universe contains no model for sexually charged long-term love, a condition otherwise known as a happy marriage. Does Roth himself believe that the possibility exists? “Yes,” he replies to my question, “and some people play the violin like Isaac Stern. But it’s rare.”
Yet Roth proposed marriage to the woman who was the model for Consuela. She wasn’t Cuban, and she did not have cancer. But she was in her mid-twenties and nearly six feet tall, and she took his breath away. He was in his late sixties (“or maybe I was ninety,” he throws in). He has never really been a “monk of writing,” or of anything else. But for the first time in his life, he says, he felt jealousy. He knew that he was bound to lose her. And he did. That is his suffering on the page; it’s fair to say, too, that those are her breasts. He was willing to take a chance on marriage, just to try to keep her away from younger men of the kind he used to be. Just to try to keep her. He portrayed a truly good marriage once, he recalls, with the Levovs in American Pastoral—because he enjoyed giving two such evidently proper people an exciting sex life, and because he wanted to deepen the tragedy when they are torn apart. Outside of literature, he knows a few men, his contemporaries, who are still passionate about their wives of several decades—his friend Al Alvarez, he says, is one. “I say to them,” Roth says with surprising, quiet solemnity, “you are blessed.”
Look Homeward, Angel
How clever Kafka was to have his metamorphosis take place within a family. The family stands for the recognizable, we know just what to expect from a family. Then comes the unexpected! Must remember this and try it for myself sometime.
—Philip Roth to Jack Miles, December 2, 1977
The most startling sentence in The Dying Animal has nothing to do with sex. It’s part of a description of the international New Year’s Eve celebrations, seen on television, when Consuela visits her old professor on the eve of the year 2000: “Brilliance flaring across the time zones, and none ignited by bin Laden.” Since the book was published in the spring of 2001, it seemed natural to ask Roth if he hadn’t exposed himself as the Mossad agent he had merely pretended to be in Operation Shylock: how else had he come to write about bin Laden months before 9/11? His answer, far more logical, if less sensational, is that he was struck by footage on TV, after the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, that showed bin Laden walking through a military camp while missiles and tracer bullets flared like fireworks against the sky. The reference in The Dying Animal is not a warning, though—or, at least, not a warning against what our enemies might inflict. Roth saw the Western world’s millennial celebrations as a release from our fears that the twentieth century would bring even greater, nuclear destruction. It had not happened. We had come through. Yet for Roth, this triumph had led to nothing nobler than an age of continuously televised trivialization. “No bombs go off, no blood is shed—the next bang you hear will be the boom of prosperity and the explosion of markets,” Kepesh thinks. The country was entering a new and prosperous dark age.
And then came the attack on the World Trade Center. On the morning of September 11, 2001, Roth was in a swimming pool in the City Athletic Club in midtown Manhattan, where he regularly went to exercise and relieve his back pain. (Not to be confused with the famed New York Athletic Club, this club was established in 1909 to accommodate Jewish men excluded from the city’s other athletic organizations.) He came out of the pool to hear the news. Leaving the building, he walked with the crowds up Sixth Avenue. He was glad to be in the city rather than off in Connecticut, and he had no thought of leaving: “I wouldn’t have wanted to be alone.” Cultural trivialization no longer seemed like such a pressing issue. For all his criticism of American cultural habits, Roth is obviously a product of the Second World War and a patriot. Over the next few days, he tells me, he became “furious with people like Susan Sontag who were blaming America and blaming the victims—people who said the deed was a result of American policy in the Middle East rather than a result of the way these people were brought up and abused by their own countries.” He put a big American flag in his window, a full-wall window leading to a balcony that faces south over the city, with a clear view of the skyline.
It would be utterly mistaken to say that his politics had become in any way conservative. Roth is a man who closely values friendships and does not depend on or even particularly prize unanimity of opinion to keep them going. (One of the main activites he engaged in with Melvin Tumin, a political hawk, was arguing about Vietnam.) But he wasn’t happy when his friend Ron Silver, the actor who had performed several of the audio versions of his books, cited the 9/11 attacks as a reason for converting from Democratic liberalism to fervent support of President Bush. Silver spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2004. A few weeks later, Roth and Silver had a heated discussion on the phone—Roth says that Silver complained of being blacklisted by liberals, which Roth considered a cheap shot at sympathy—and Roth broke off the friendship. He says that he shouted at Silver as he had never shouted at either of his ex-wives.
Roth began The Plot Against America in December 2000—a month before George W. Bush took office, after a contested election that, from many Democrats’ point of view, was not contested enough. Roth’s immediate inspiration was a sente
nce in a book by Arthur Schlesinger. After quoting from a speech made by Charles Lindbergh, in September 1941, in which he castigated American Jews for pushing the country toward war, Schlesinger observed that isolationist Republicans might have done better if they had joined together under Lindbergh, the nationally beloved record-breaking pilot and Nazi sympathizer. And Roth wrote in the margin, “What if they had?” And what if, instead of winning a third term in 1940, Roosevelt had been beaten by the young and charismatic, isolationist and anti-Semitic Lindbergh? A crucial election gone seriously wrong. After so many counterlives, why not a counterhistory?
He understood at once that such a history, wholly invented—a Lindbergh presidency, sympathetic to Nazi aims—had to be grounded in reality, specifically in the travails of a real family trying to get through its daily life. And he knew immediately that the family would be his own. This was a welcome aspect of the book, if not, in some ways, its heart. In an essay that he wrote on the book’s release, in The New York Times, in 2004, he stated that it had given him “an opportunity to bring my parents back from the grave.” This touching phrase recalls the “eruption of parental longing” that was his reason for writing The Facts some fifteen years earlier. Writing as an act of resurrection. The goal was to “restore them to what they were at the height of their powers in their late 30’s,” he went on, and to portray them faithfully, “as though I were, in fact, writing nonfiction.” But there was one important difference: these modest, working-class American Jews now had to contend with a European-style fascist threat that legitimated all their Old World fears—that made sense of the paranoia that drove Alexander Portnoy to the couch, that made a virtue of the paranoia. Threatened, persecuted, put to the test, they had a chance to expand their simple decency into outright heroism, both physical and moral.
Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books Page 33
