The Humbling by Philip Roth
November 2, 2009
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
140 pages
Although it lacks the scope and detail of Roth’s masterworks like The Human Stain and American Pastoral, The Humbling presents a convincingly haunting – albeit too brief – glimpse into the complex darkness of a decaying star at his lowest and most vulnerable. The prose is disturbing, the characters more so, and the brusque plot is generally riveting. For his thirtieth book, Roth departs from Newark, his longtime muse, to impart the novella-length tragedy of Simon Axler, an aging stage actor who, at 65, finds himself unable to act, and engaged in an invigorating yet confounding affair with an ex-lesbian 25 years his junior. In much of Roth’s most recent work (Everyman, Exit Ghost), the dialogue appears unrealistic to the point of being distracting. However, in The Humbling, this self-aware (in true Roth fashion) “soap opera” speak, far from seeming stilted, embellishes the suffocating sense of the primary characters only being able to exist and function in scripted roles that are either ill-chosen or unknowingly thrust upon them, roles that can only be renounced by carefully conceived deception or spontaneous violence. Also featuring some of Roth’s raunchiest (and best) sex scenes since Portnoy’s Complaint, The Humbling is a late-career bright spot that deserves a larger canvas.
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