The Dying Animal

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David Kepesh is white-haired and over sixty, an eminent TV culture critic and star lecturer at a NewYork college, when he meets Consuela Castillo, a decorous, well-mannered student of twenty-four, who promptly puts his life into erotic disorder. Since the sexual revolution of the Sixties, when he left his wife and child, Kepesh has been living a life of ‘emancipated manhood’, without ties or responsibilities. But the youth and beauty of Consuela, ‘a masterpiece of volupté’, undo him completely, and his worldliness, his confidence and reason desert him as he slides into the depths of a maddening sexual jealousy. The carefree erotic adventure with which he began evolves, over eight years, into a tragic story of love and loss.