"The Dying Animal" has none of the relieving humanity of "The Human Stain," Roth's last - superb - book. In doing that, it is a rich portrait of the affliction of egocentric loneness, a plague of the last one-third of the 20th century. It submits to unflinching examination the epidemic of philandering that flourished in the 1960s and reached its pinnacle in the 1990s. It plays out with terrifying immediacy the triviality of the emotionally disabled narcissist. It is a painful book, a frightening book. Roth had presented sex as "the revenge on death." It emerges, rather, as Kepesh's dodging of the simplest truths of human warmth and caring.
Her affliction and his reaction profoundly confront the puzzle of mortality. She is suffering from advanced breast cancer. He recognizes her powerful potential to control him. Some six years after their break and almost eight since they first met, Kepesh believes he had got over Consuela entirely. That wasn't the kick he remarried for, even though once he was a husband again he almost immediately resumed pursuing the old delights." But my friend's need was for something more basic to his safety than the adulterer's daily drama of fording a river of lies. A page later, writing of his closest friend, a man of a crippled character much like his own, Kepesh says: "Marriage at its best is a sure-fire stimulant to the thrills of licentious subterfuge.
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