This is a vicious, furious book, unapologetically not of this age - it is also horribly funny and unflinchingly honest` New Statesman David Kepesh, white-haired, and now in his sixties, is an eminent cultural critic on NPR radio and a formidable lecturer at a New York college. For years he`s been casually, almost habitually, sleeping with the more spirited of his female students, though with an aesthete`s critical distance. But now he`s met Consuela Castillo, a twenty-four-year-old Cuban student of such head-turning beauty, that Kapesh finds himself dragged helplessly into a quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. The Dying Animal is a virtuoso performance from Philip Roth, following Kapesh through the tumult of erotic lust and the search for freedom, shackled by a mortal human body.