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Philip Roth is a trenchant, witty, and psychologically sophisticated observer of the male psyche and the American cultural scene. Though Roth is perhaps best known for his comic portrayal of raw male sexual desire in such novels as Portnoy's Complaint or his depictions of the vicissitudes of the American Jewish experience (American Pastoral, The Plot against America), two recently published novels, The Dying Animal and Everyman, show that he is equally adept at addressing the complexities that surround the ultimate questions of love and loss, living and dying. His earlier work has always reflected his interest in the claims and desires of “the human body (usually male) in its strength, its frailty, and its often ridiculous need” (Pierpont 2006, p. 82), but in these two novels he examines the ultimate endgame of life, the point at which the manic defenses of erotic pleasure seeking begin perforce to wane, along with one's power, strength, and vigor, sexual and otherwise. For psychoanalysts, in particular, these two novels should be of special interest for the insight they offer and the questions they raise about the all-too-human conflicts of commitment vs. freedom, attachment vs. Eros, and ultimately about the struggle between reality and illusion and the role played by sexuality and sensuousness in our attempts to both deal with and evade the inevitability of mortality, death, and decline.
In The Dying Animal—the title is taken from a line in Yeats's “Sailing to Byzantium”—Roth's protagonist, the aging David Kepesh,