Throughout his career, Roth has refused to prettify lust, refused to deny the desire to possess and even to degrade that, he has insisted, cannot be separated from the male sexual psyche. In "The Dying Animal," Kepesh, who is recalling an affair that began with his beautiful 24-year-old student Consuela when he was 62, remembers putting his penis in the young woman's mouth and explains, "I was so bored, you see, by the mechanical blow jobs that, to shock her, I kept her fixed there, kept her steady by holding her hair, by turning a twist of hair in one hand and wrapping it around my fist like a thong, like a strap, like the reins that fasten to the bit of a bridle." When he's done, Kepesh and the young woman look each other "cold in the eye" and she snaps her teeth at him. His response to this threat of what she could have done and didn't is: "at last the forthright, incisive, elemental response from the controlled classical beauty."

It's not a pleasant passage, and you can scarcely blame anyone, especially women, for being offended by it. But to raise the objection that it's ugly or gives offense is to ignore the question of whether it's true. And this, to me, is the fundamental gap that Roth's recent work -- the trilogy of "American Pastoral," "I Married a Communist" and "The Human Stain," and now this controlled and ferocious coda to the Kepesh books -- means to bridge: the chasm that has opened between what is acceptable and what is true.

I don't think there's any escaping that, on some level, Roth means to offend, means, like Kepesh with Consuela, to hold us down and put it to us. That isn't to say that his writing is crude or abusive or that he's just working us over; he's too much of a craftsman, interested more in argument than in force. But if you are trying to break through niceties, if you are trying to identify the rapacious in the sexual, then perhaps you have to give offense before you can be heard.

For Kepesh sex is the truest connection. The lead-up to his first seduction of Consuela, when the two are talking about her life, about literature and painting, Kepesh calls "the comedy of creating a connection that is not the connection -- that cannot begin to compete with the connection -- created unartificially by lust." He chats with this young woman about Kafka and Velázquez and wonders, "What does any of this have to do with her tits and her skin and the way she carries herself?" What may shock people most about Kepesh is the unmistakable element of worship in that question, and the seeming serenity that his pursuit of sex has brought him. In "The Professor of Desire" sex was a lurking beast ready to devour the stable life Kepesh had built for himself with his devoted, adoring mate. In another version of the ruthless self-invention that characterized every volume of Roth's trilogy, Kepesh, in "The Dying Animal," has long since identified (and expunged) the instincts toward marriage and family that he sees as the disruptive factors of life. He attends to his intellectual and carnal pursuits happily, with little room for regret.

Roth does nothing so conventional as use Kepesh's choice to demonstrate how empty his life is. In one of the novel's gutsiest moves, the son who despises Kepesh for leaving his mother is conducting his own affair with a younger woman. In "The Dying Animal" sex comes to swallow everyone who tries to deny its power, who has not, as Kepesh has, made some sacrificial offering.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"