SOURCE: Lodge, David. “Sick with Desire.” New York Review of Books 48, no. 11 (5 July 2001): 28-32.

In the following review, Lodge appreciates Roth's literary achievements and judges The Dying Animal as a brief “disturbing masterpiece.”

Philip Roth's output of fiction in the seventh decade of his life has been astonishing for both quality and quantity. It has been to critics and fellow novelists a spectacle to marvel at, an awe-inspiring display of energy, like the sustained eruption of a volcano that many observers supposed to be—not extinct, certainly, but perhaps past the peak of its active life. One might indeed have been forgiven for thinking that Sabbath's Theater (1995) was the final explosive discharge of the author's imaginative obsessions, sex and death—specifically, the affirmation of sexual experiment and transgression as an existential defiance of death, all the more authentic for being ultimately doomed to failure. Micky Sabbath, who boasts...