SOURCE: Heller, Zoë. “The Ghost Rutter.” New Republic 224, no. 21 (21 May 2001): 39-42.

In the following review, Heller considers sexual intercourse as a major theme of The Dying Animal, and of Roth's entire oeuvre.

When we first met Professor David Kepesh in 1972, in Philip Roth's novella The Breast, he was a junior academic who had recently awoken to find himself transformed into a one-hundred-fifty-five-pound female bosom. Later, Roth toyed with the notion of writing a sequel to The Breast, a book about Kepesh's experiences as a celebrity breast-at-large. (Kepesh was to tour America in a customized padded van, making appearances on The Tonight Show, fucking groupies with his outsize nipple, and so on.) But in the end—wisely, perhaps—the writer abandoned plans for this Mel Brooks-type riff, and the mammary episode was allowed to remain a discrete sui generis absurdity. When next Kepesh appeared, in The Professor of Desire...