Word: roth
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...religious, I'm going to shove my rosary down their throat." That spirit, along with his Scranton roots, could attract him more sympathy from fellow Catholics when criticized by church leaders. "His blue-collar background may inoculate him in ways that it couldn't for John Kerry," says Bill Roth, president of the Catholic Democrats...
There is - or so we like to think - a natural order to mortality. As Philip Roth observes in The Dying Animal, of which Elegy is a very faithful adaptation, we expect our grandparents to be the first to go, then our parents, then (unimaginably) ourselves - a very long time in the future...
...point the love affair proceeds predictably - even including their breakup (he has, as you might expect, a commitment issue). She leaves him. He mourns perhaps excessively. She, astonishingly, returns to him some years later. And here both the Roth novel and Isabel Coixet's film (written by Nicholas Meyer) take a truly memorable turn. For she is gravely ill and living alone with the possibility of premature death. She wants Kepesh to take erotic photographs of her before the surgeon's knife destroys her beauty. Does she want more from him? If so, can he respond to her need...
This is a matter both film and book leave ambiguous. Because, in some sense - and I know this is going to sound strange - it is really no more than a plot point, something that plausibly carries us to the matter that, in recent years, has most obsessively concerned Philip Roth. Even his most casual readers know him as our only great erotic novelist, a man who spent his early career both hilariously and heartbreakingly exploring the contortions of the spirit that our sexuality imposes on us. Truly, to borrow the title of an earlier Roth novel, he has been...
...right, it's the old Eros-Thanatos trope. But no one has addressed it with Roth's passionate realism. Or with his conviction that the result of this conflict can only be the terrible muddle that finally elbows aside the previously preoccupying sexual shambles. That's especially true of The Dying Animal, when mortality settles on the wrong person at the wrong time. There are things wrong with Coixet's movie. Ben Kingsley is, of course, a fine actor, but in this instance there seems to me something smug, held back, in his work. Roth's Kepesh, at least...