Before his death, Jonathan Swift pointed to a blighted tree and said to a friend, “I shall be like that tree; I shall die first at the top.” Philip Roth’s dying animals, at loose in the twilit carnival of his late work, reverse Swift’s prophecy: they fear they will die from the bottom up. Their minds are ripe with sexual energy, with transgressive vitality, but their bodies are sour with decline. The aging David Kepesh, in “The Dying Animal,” makes the mistake of growing infatuated with one of his many young conquests, and becomes the toy of her youthful sexual mastery. The elderly nameless protagonist of “Everyman,” Roth’s previous novel, weakened by heart surgery, watches young women jogging along a New Jersey boardwalk, aware of the absurd disparity between his waxing mind and his waning body. He starts a foolishly flirtatious conversation with one of them, who then changes her route and never returns, “thereby thwarting his longing for the last great outburst of everything.

(more. . .)

See also Terry Gross’ interview of Philip Roth (NPR)

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