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Summary
Summary
David Kepesh is an eminent cultural critic and star lecturer at a New York college-as well as an articulate propagandist of the sexual revolution. For years he has made a practice of sleeping with adventurous female students while maintaining an aesthete's critical distance. But now that distance has been annihilated.
When he becomes involved with Consuela Castillo, the humblingly beautiful daughter of Cuban exiles, Kepesh finds himself dragged helplessly, bitterly, furiously into the quagmire of sexual jealousy and loss. In chronicling this descent, Philip Roth performs a breathtaking set of variations on the themes of eros and mortality, license and repression, selfishness and sacrifice.
Author Notes
Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on March 19, 1933. He attended Rutgers University for one year before transferring to Bucknell University where he completed a B.A. in English with highest honors in 1954. He received an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1955.
His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, received the National Book Award in 1960. His other books include Letting Go, When She Was Good, Portnoy's Complaint, My Life as a Man, The Ghostwriter, Zuckerman Unbound, I Married a Communist, The Plot Against America, The Facts, The Anatomy Lesson, Exit Ghost, Deception, Nemesis, Everyman, Indignation, and The Humbling. He won the National Book Critic Circle Awards in 1987 for his novel The Counterlife and in 1992 for his memoir Patrimony: A True Story. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1993 for Operation Shylock: A Confession and in 2001 for The Human Stain, the National Book Award in 1995 for Sabbath's Theater, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for American Pastoral. He stopped writing in 2010. He died from congestive heart failure on May 22, 2018 at the age of 85.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Eros and mortality are the central themes of Roth's frank, unsparing and curious new novella. It's curious not only because of its short form (new for Roth), but because he seems to have assumed the mantle of Saul Bellow, writing pages of essay-like exposition on contemporary social phenomena and advancing the narrative through introspection rather than dialogue. The protagonist is again David Kepesh (of The Breast and The Professor of Desire), who left his wife and son during the sexual revolution vowing to indulge his erotic needs without encumbrance. Kepesh is now an eminent 70-year-old cultural critic and lecturer at a New York college, recalling a devastating, all-consuming affair he had eight years before with voluptuous 24-year-old Consuela Castillo, a graduate student and daughter of a prosperous Cuban migr family. From the beginning, Kepesh is oppressed by the "unavoidable poignancy" of their age difference, and he suffers with the jealous knowledge that this liaison will likely be his last; even when locked in the throes of sexual congress, a death's head looms in his imagination. The end of the affair casts him into a long depression. When Consuela contacts him again eight years later, on the New Year's Eve of the millennium, their reunion is doubly ironic in the Roth tradition. Consuela has devastating news about her body, and it's obvious that retribution is at hand for the old libertine. Roth's candor about an elderly man's consciousness that he's "a dying animal" (from the Yeats poem) is unsentimental, and his descriptions of the lovers' erotic acts push the envelope in at least one scene involving menstruation. The novella is as brilliantly written, line by line, as any book in Roth's oeuvre, and it's bound to be talked about with gusto. (May 18) Forecast: Roth's audience is faithful, and the erotic explicitness of this book may attract other readers who have not tackled the author's longer novels. But his longtime refusal to do talk shows or give interviews will as usual limit publicity efforts, and it remains to be seen whether such a narrowly focused story will sell with the rapidity of Roth's longer novels. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
The tremendous power of Roth's writing is rooted in his uncanny ability to transform thought into a palpable force. Every potently composed sentence of this taut and ferocious tale--a surging confessional rant by professor and critic David Kepesh, whom Roth first conjured into existence in The Breast and The Professor of Desire and who's now a flinty 70--lands in the reader's mind like a grenade. Kepesh is recounting his infatuation with a former student, a salacious recitation that segues into a provocative critique of the consequences of the sexual revolution and a riveting debate about timeless questions of freedom, pleasure, and love. Roth is a masterful chronicler of erotic desire and obsession, and as his hero describes his helplessness before the voluptuous beauty of the well-bred Consuela Castillo, a self-contained 24 to his rapacious 62 when they first meet, he delves into everything from the extremism of the Puritans to whether or not sex is the only time "you are most cleanly alive and most cleanly yourself." Along the way, he also examines the claustrophobia of marriage, the "pornography of jealousy," the "wound of age," and, finally, inescapably, death. Kepesh may be selfish and manipulative, but Roth has imbued him with profound integrity and blazing intelligence--his riffs on sexual politics and the inanity of mass culture are not to be missed. Kepesh owns up to the tragic fact that his pursuit of personal liberty cost him his son's love, and, for all his braggadocio, he truly worships women. Virtuosic, riling, and fearless, Roth is the bard of the modern American psyche. Donna Seaman
Guardian Review
As Philip Roth nears 70, it is apparent that his life's work is the history of the male psyche from childhood to old age. His last four amazing books, from 1995's Sabbath's Theater , in which he abandoned the playful postmodernism of his narrator Nathan Zuckerman's youth and middle age, have seen him scorch through 50 years of post-war America. Don DeLillo can do that, but only Roth has got under the skin of his own generation, the men born into Roosevelt's Depression era, marrying under Eisenhower, divorcing under Johnson, and reaching for the Viagra in the time of Clinton. It is an unspoken rule of literary pages that women are not sent Roth for review, and this is not just because Roth speaks of what women don't want to hear: the male sexual drive liberated from love and attachment; the fact that men desire women first for their bodies, only secondarily for their minds; that professors of comparative literature are like this, as well as the numbskulls. Roth is no different from Saul Bellow, whose shallow portrayals of women display the condition of a man who is a product of his times, but it has by now become apparent to many of Roth's ardent admirers, both male and female (and I am a big cheerleader in the latter group), that there is in him a dark distaste for women, a repugnance that can only be described by the word misogyny. Which is bizarre, because Roth, for all his rages, can be the most humane, empathetic and compassionate of observers. To come to Roth with the weapons of feminist criticism - to read him as Kate Millett might have done in her groundbreaking analysis of D H Lawrence and Henry Miller in Sexual Politics (1969) - seems churlish, brutal and reductive. Male desire is, after all, the point, and to attempt to destroy Roth with the kind of political correctness he has waged war against in his fiction would make one feel ashamed to claim to be a literate reader. Barely a year after The Human Stain , the triumphant closing of his trilogy of post-war America, Roth is back with a coda, a short book in which he resurrects an earlier character: David Kepesh, the man who wanted to turn into a breast and whose life history we heard in The Professor of Desire (1977). We last saw Kepesh, the son of Catskill Mountain resort operators, established in academia with one disastrous marriage behind him. In a moment of supreme self- knowledge, looking at the body of the woman he loves, he recognises that his desire for her won't be sustained - that passion will turn to duty, and that he is both powerless to prevent this sexual boredom in himself and unwilling to contemplate the hypocrisy of adulterous married life. Kepesh is now in his 60s, still an academic but nominally a celebrity, at least in New York, for his role as a cultural critic on public-service TV and radio. His creed remains his own declaration of sexual independence, pointing out to his estranged, disapproving son that America itself is founded on freedoms, so why constrain yourself? "Because only when you fuck is everything that you dislike in life and everything by which you are defeated in life purely if momentarily revenged. Only then are you most cleanly alive and most cleanly yourself." The sexual revolution and women's liberation have been good to him, delivering to his study door a succession of girls as intent on erotic adventure as he was in his own 20s. His girlfriends are recruited from his students, and he theorises that they are drawn to "old gents" not despite the age gap but because of it; because of the power it gives them to enter the lives of men who would be otherwise inaccessible, and to have them submit to the force of their youth and beauty. We glimpse earlier conquests, students of 20 and 30 years ago, now in their 40s, divorced, childless and alone. Humiliated by their encounters with the dates provided by marriage bureaux, they come to Kepesh's bed because of his sexual generosity (forgiving a woman a 35lb weight gain). There are no female Kepeshs, lechers with an inexhaustible supply of young male admirers; not in this book, and not in life. This is a point that Roth acknowledges but does not explore. The reasons are too obvious to excite curiosity and investigation: youth and beauty are everything. This year's victim is Consuela, the daughter of Cuban exiles, a girl with monumental breasts beneath her silk blouses, pronounced by Kepesh "a great work of art . . . Not the artist but the art itself." In other words, the passive object rather than the active subject. But Kepesh finds himself undone; tripped up in late-middle age by the most bourgeois of instincts, jealousy and possessiveness."The eternal problem of attachment. No, not even fucking can stay totally pure and protected." Consuela leaves him, enraged when he does not attend her graduation party. She returns five years later, on New Year's Eve 1999, terribly transformed. The breasts which to Kepesh seemed her synecdoche - the sign that stands for the whole - are clotted with tumours. Breast cancer runs in her family, and Consuela is on the eve of a radical mastectomy and the possibility of early death. Consuela's visit is purely for the sake of her breasts. She wants Kepesh to say goodbye to them and give them one last admiring grope before her mutilation. Every woman I have told this to bursts out laughing. It makes total sense within the psychic structure of the novel; none whatsoever to the people who actually have the breasts. For Roth, women are always the art, never the artist; always - to use a term from the feminist 1970s - the sexual object rather than the sexual self. Consuela, never fully alive to begin with, dwindles into literary device. Who is the dying animal? Ironically it is not the old man but the young girl, the inverted triumph of age over beauty. Yet in the book's last two pages, Consuela calls Kepesh. The operation is imminent, she is panicking, he wants to go to her. An unseen, unknown voice (the next girlfriend?) warns him: "Think about it. Think. Because if you go you're finished." And there you have Kepesh's dilemma. Freedom or attachment? Life or living death? Lucky him to have the choice. To order this book for pounds 10.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-roth.1 As [Philip Roth] nears 70, it is apparent that his life's work is the history of the male psyche from childhood to old age. His last four amazing books, from 1995's Sabbath's Theater , in which he abandoned the playful postmodernism of his narrator Nathan Zuckerman's youth and middle age, have seen him scorch through 50 years of post-war America. Don DeLillo can do that, but only Roth has got under the skin of his own generation, the men born into Roosevelt's Depression era, marrying under Eisenhower, divorcing under Johnson, and reaching for the Viagra in the time of Clinton. It is an unspoken rule of literary pages that women are not sent Roth for review, and this is not just because Roth speaks of what women don't want to hear: the male sexual drive liberated from love and attachment; the fact that men desire women first for their bodies, only secondarily for their minds; that professors of comparative literature are like this, as well as the numbskulls. Roth is no different from Saul Bellow, whose shallow portrayals of women display the condition of a man who is a product of his times, but it has by now become apparent to many of Roth's ardent admirers, both male and female (and I am a big cheerleader in the latter group), that there is in him a dark distaste for women, a repugnance that can only be described by the word misogyny. Which is bizarre, because Roth, for all his rages, can be the most humane, empathetic and compassionate of observers. To come to Roth with the weapons of feminist criticism - to read him as Kate Millett might have done in her groundbreaking analysis of D H Lawrence and Henry Miller in Sexual Politics (1969) - seems churlish, brutal and reductive. Male desire is, after all, the point, and to attempt to destroy Roth with the kind of political correctness he has waged war against in his fiction would make one feel ashamed to claim to be a literate reader. - Linda Grant.
Kirkus Review
The recent creative surge that has produced some of Roths best fiction continues with this intense short novel narrated by David Kepesh (protagonist also of The Breast and The Professor of Desire), whos a more highly eroticized counterpart of Roths other serial alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman. The subject is Kepeshs reluctant arrival at the threshold of old age and his unquenched vulnerability to the spectacle of sex, to which he wryly refers as the imbecility of lust and the chaos of eros. Its specific focus is his memory, eight years after the fact, of his consuming affair with Consuela Castillo, a beautiful Cuban-American student and the last of a series of younger mistresses who had assuaged his aging for more than 40 years, dating back to the early years of his long-ago (only) marriage. Kepeshs detailed anatomy (no other word will really do) of Consuelas charms stimulates brief memory glimpses of other women (some companionable divorcées of mature years, others embodiments of the swinging 60s whose boldness simultaneously delighted and puzzled him), as well as more discursive (and labored) reflections on Lord of Misrule Thomas Morton of Puritan Massachusettss Merry Mount colony; Kepeshs tortured relationship with his middle-aged son Kenny (another victim of sex, to whom his vagrant father is a dead ringer for Dostoevskys lustful patriarch, Karamazov pére), andin the most potent scene herethe last hours of Kepeshs closest male friend, an adulterous poet who incarnates man the dying animal (a phrase from a Yeats poem) clinging to the last fumbling vestiges of the sexuality that enables him to deny death. Roth then struggles, with mixed success, to pull these strands together in the climax, which occurs on the cusp of the recent millennium, as Consuela returns to him, to confront the fact of her own mortality. This need. This derangement. Will it never stop?, Roths most sexually importunate figure demands of himself. Probably notand well probably be treated to further ruminations on why this should be so in a future David Kepesh novel.
Library Journal Review
That the listener may come to dislike the narrator of this story is testament to its intensity. David Kepesh, professor of comparative literature and local TV pundit, is in his 70s when he confides this account of his May-December affair with a former student. Told in the first person, Kepesh's introduction to himself and to Consuela, his 24-year-old love goddess (ask him about her breasts), is framed within a value system that uses sex as its mortar. Kepesh, whom Roth introduced as a 38-year-old in The Breast and later starred in The Professor of Desire, never outgrew the 1960s free-love culture that inspired him to leave his wife and son to hold court as a sexual savant. Kepesh may not be likable, but he is fascinating. Reader Arliss Howard relates the story as if to a dinner companion a bit bored, unabashed, and pruriently matter-of-fact. A former National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner, Roth ensnares the listener with a rich narrative; highly recommended for all adult fiction collections. Judith Robinson, Univ. at Buffalo, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
I knew her eight years ago. She was in my class. I don't teach full-time anymore, strictly speaking don't teach literature at all-for years now just the one class, a big senior seminar in critical writing called Practical Criticism. I attract a lot of female students. For two reasons. Because it's a subject with an alluring combination of intellectual glamour and journalistic glamour and because they've heard me on NPR reviewing books or seen me on Thirteen talking about culture. Over the past fifteen years, being cultural critic on the television program has made me fairly well known locally, and they're attracted to my class because of that. In the beginning, I didn't realize that talking on TV once a week for ten minutes could be so impressive as it turns out to be to these students. But they are helplessly drawn to celebrity, however inconsiderable mine may be. Now, I'm very vulnerable to female beauty, as you know. Everybody's defenseless against something, and that's it for me. I see it and it blinds me to everything else. They come to my first class, and I know almost immediately which is the girl for me. There is a Mark Twain story in which he runs from a bull, and the bull looks up to him when he's hiding in a tree, and the bull thinks, "You are my meat, sir." Well, that "sir" is transformed into "young lady" when I see them in class. It is now eight years ago-I was already sixty-two, and the girl, who is called Consuela Castillo, was twenty-four. She is not like the rest of the class. She doesn't look like a student, at least not like an ordinary student. She's not a demiadolescent, she's not a slouching, unkempt, "like"-ridden girl. She's well spoken, sober, her posture is perfect-she appears to know something about adult life along with how to sit, stand, and walk. As soon as you enter the class, you see that this girl either knows more or wants to. The way she dresses. It isn't exactly what's called chic, she's certainly not flamboyant, but, to begin with, she's never in jeans, pressed or unpressed. She dresses carefully, with quiet taste, in skirts, dresses, and tailored pants. Not to desensualize herself but more, it would seem, to professionalize herself, she dresses like an attractive secretary in a prestigious legal firm. Like the secretary to the bank chairman. She has a cream-colored silk blouse under a tailored blue blazer with gold buttons, a brown pocketbook with the patina of expensive leather, and little ankle boots to match, and she wears a slightly stretchy gray knitted skirt that reveals her body lines as subtly as such a skirt possibly could. Her hair is done in a natural but cared-for manner. She has a pale complexion, the mouth is bowlike though the lips are full, and she has a rounded forehead, a polished forehead of a smooth Brancusi elegance. She is Cuban. Her family are prosperous Cubans living in Jersey, across the river in Bergen County. She has black, black hair, glossy but ever so slightly coarse. And she's big. She's a big woman. The silk blouse is unbuttoned to the third button, and so you see she has powerful, beautiful breasts. You see the cleavage immediately. And you see she knows it. You see, despite the decorum, the meticulousness, the cautiously soigné style-or because of them-that she's aware of herself. She comes to the first class with the jacket buttoned over her blouse, yet some five minutes into the session, she has taken it off. When I glance her way again, I see that she's put it back on. So you understand that she's aware of her power but that she isn't sure yet how to use it, what to do with it, how much she even wants it. That body is still new to her, she's still trying it out, thinking it through, a bit like a kid walking the streets with a loaded gun and deciding whether he's packing it to protect himself or to begina life of crime. And she's aware of something else, and this I couldn't know from the one class meeting: she finds culture important in a reverential, old-fashioned way. Not that it's something she wishes to live by. She doesn't and she couldn't-too traditionally well brought up for that-but it's important and wonderful as nothing else she knows is. She's the one who finds the Impressionists ravishing but must look long and hard-and always with a sense of nagging confoundment-at a Cubist Picasso, trying with all her might to get the idea. She stands there waiting for the surprising new sensation, the new thought, the new emotion, and when it won't come, ever, she chides herself for being inadequate and lacking . . . what? She chides herself for not even knowing what it is she lacks. Art that smacks of modernity leaves her not merely puzzled but disappointed in herself. She would love for Picasso to matter more, perhaps to transform her, but there's a scrim drawn across the proscenium of genius that obscures her vision and keeps her worshiping at a bit of a distance. She gives to art, to all of art, far more than she gets back, a sort of earnestness that isn't without its poignant appeal. A good heart, a lovely face, a gaze at once inviting and removed, gorgeous breasts, and so newly hatched as a woman that to find fragments of broken shell adhering to that ovoid forehead wouldn't have been a surprise. I saw right away that this was going to be my girl. Now, I have one set rule of some fifteen years' standing that I never break. I don't any longer get in touch with them on a private basis until they've completed their final exam and received their grade and I am no longer officially in loco parentis. In spite of temptation-or even a clear-cut signal to begin the flirtation and make the approach-I haven't broken this rule since, back in the mid-eighties, the phone number of the sexual harassment hotline was first posted outside my office door. I don't get in touch with them any earlier so as not to run afoul of those in the university who, if they could, would seriously impede my enjoyment of life. I teach each year for fourteen weeks, and during that time I don't have affairs with them. I play a trick instead. It's an honest trick, it's an open and aboveboard trick, but it is a trick nonetheless. After the final examination and once the grades are in, I throw a party in my apartment for the students. It is always a success and it is always the same. I invite them for a drink at about six o'clock. I say that from six to eight we are going to have a drink, and they always stay till two in the morning. The bravest ones, after ten o'clock, develop into lively characters and tell me what they really are interested in. In the Practical Criticism seminar there are about twenty students, sometimes as many as twenty-five, so there will be fifteen, sixteen girls and five or six boys, of whom two or three are straight. Half of this group has left the party by ten. Generally, one straight boy, maybe one gay boy, and some nine girls will stay. They're invariably the most cultivated, intelligent, and spirited of the lot. They talk about what they're reading, what they're listening to, what art shows they've seen-enthusiasms that they don't normally go on about with their elders or necessarily with their friends. They find one another in my class. And they find me. During the party they suddenly see I am a human being. I'm not their teacher, I'm not my reputation, I'm not their parent. I have a pleasant, orderly duplex apartment, they see my large library, aisles of double-faced bookshelves that house a lifetime's reading and take up almost the entire down stairs floor, they see my piano, they see my devotion to what I do, and they stay. My funniest student one year was like the goat in the fairy tale that goes into the clock to hide. I threw the last of them out at two in the morning, and while saying good night, I missed one girl. I said, "Where is our class clown, Prospero's daughter?" "Oh, I think Miranda left," somebody said. I went back into the apartment to start cleaning the place up and I heard a door being closed upstairs. A bathroom door. And Miranda came down the stairs, laughing, radiant with a kind of goofy abandon-I'd never, till that moment, realized that she was so pretty-and she said, "Wasn't that clever of me? I've been hiding in your upstairs bathroom, and now I'm going to sleep with you." A little thing, maybe five foot one, and she pulled off her sweater and showed me her tits, revealing the adolescent torso of an incipiently transgressive Balthus virgin, and of course we slept together. All evening long, much like a young girl escaped from the perilous melodrama of a Balthus painting into the fun of the class party, Miranda had been on all fours on the floor with her rump raised or lying helplessly prostrate on my sofa or lounging gleefully across the arms of an easy chair seemingly oblivious of the fact that with her skirt riding up her thighs and her legs undecorously parted she had the Balthusian air of being half undressed while fully clothed. Everything's hidden and nothing's concealed. Many of these girls have been having sex since they were fourteen, and by their twenties there are one or two curious to do it with a man of my years, if just the once, and eager the next day to tell all their friends, who crinkle up their faces and ask, "But what about his skin? Didn't he smell funny? What about his long white hair? What about his wattle? What about his little pot belly? Didn't you feel sick?" Miranda told me afterward, "You must have slept with hundreds of women. I wanted to see what it would be like." "And?" And then she said things I didn't entirely believe, but it didn't matter. She had been audacious-she had seen she could do it, game and terrified though she may have been while hiding in the bathroom. She discovered how courageous she was confronting this unfamiliar juxtaposition, that she could conquer her initial fears and any initial revulsion, and I-as regards the juxtaposition-had a wonderful time altogether. Sprawling, clowning, cavorting Miranda, posing with her underwear at her feet. Just the pleasure of looking was lovely. Though that was hardly the only reward. The decades since the sixties have done a remarkable job of completing the sexual revolution. This is a generation of astonishing fellators. There's been nothing like them ever before among their class of young women. Consuela Castillo. I saw her and was tremendously impressed by her comportment. She knew what her body was worth. She knew what she was. She knew too she could never fit into the cultural world I lived in-culture was to bedazzle her but not something to live with. So she came to the party-beforehand I'd worried that she might not show up-and was outgoing with me there for the first time. Uncertain as to just how sober and cautious she might be, I had been careful not to reveal any special interest in her during the class meetings or on the two occasions when we met in my office to go over her papers. Nor was she, in those private meetings, anything other than subdued and respectful, taking down every word I said, no matter how unimportant. Always, in my office, she entered and exited with the tailored jacket worn over her blouse. The first time she came to see me-and we sat side by side at my desk, as directed, with the door wide open to the public corridor, all eight of our limbs, our two contrasting torsos visible to every Big Brother of a passerby (and with the window wide open as well, opened by me, flung open, for fear of her perfume)-the first time she wore elegant gray flannel cuffed pants, and the second time a black jersey skirt and black tights, but, as in class, there was always the blouse, against her white-white skin the silk blouse of one creamy shade or another unbuttoned down to the third button. At the party, however, she removed the jacket after a single glass of wine and boldly jacketless was beaming at me, offering a tantalizingly open smile. We were standing inches apart in my study, where I had been showing her a Kafka manuscript I own-three pages in Kafka's handwriting, a speech he'd given at a retirement party for the chief of the insurance office where he was working, a gift, this 1910 manuscript, from a wealthy married woman of thirty who'd been a student-mistress some years back. Consuela was talking excitedly about everything. Letting her hold the Kafka manuscript had thrilled her, and so everything was emerging at once, questions nursed by her over that whole semester while I had secretly nursed my longing. "What music do you listen to? Do you really play the piano? Do you read all day long? Do you know all the poetry on your shelves by heart?" From every question it was clear how much she marveled-her word-at what my life was, my coherent, composed cultural life. I asked her what she was doing, what her life was like, and she told me that after high school, she didn't start college immediately-she'd decided to become a private secretary. And that's what I'd seen right off: the decorous, loyal private secretary, the office treasure to a man of power, the head of the bank or the law firm. She truly was of a bygone era, a throwback to a more mannerly time, and I guessed that her way of thinking about herself, like her way of comporting herself, had a lot to do with her being the daughter of wealthy Cuban émigrés, rich people who'd fled the revolution. She told me, "I didn't like being a secretary. I tried it for a couple of years, but it's a dull world, and my parents always wanted and expected me to go to college. I finally decided to study instead. I suppose I was trying to be rebellious, but that was childish and so I enrolled here. I marvel at the arts." Again "marvel," used freely and sincerely. "Yes, what do you like?" I asked. "The theater. All kinds of theater. I go to the opera. My father loves the opera and we go to the Met together. Puccini's his favorite. I always love going with him." "You love your parents." "Very much," she said. "Tell me about them." Excerpted from Dying Animal by Philip Roth All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
