The Humbling

The Humbling finds Philip Roths in his dirty-old-man mode, as he was in The Dying Animal and Exit Ghost, except this time he leaves old friends David Kepesh and Nathan Zuckerman out of it and creates a new character, an actor named Simon Axler. As the book begins, sixty-five-year-old Simon has come to the conclusion that he can no longer act. After a disastrous performance as MacBeth, he withdraws from the stage, falls into a deep depression, and contemplates killing himself.

After a stay in a psychiatric hospital, the suicidal urge leaves, and he decamps to his farmhouse in upstate New York. He becomes revived by an unlikely affair with the child of old friends, now a forty-year-old woman. The catch? She is a lesbian.

I have no idea how much Roth pays attention to his critics, but one wonders if while writing this book he realized how he was lobbing a softball to them. The Humbling is certainly not a bad book--I inhaled its slim length (much of was read in a urologist's waiting room, fittingly enough)--but it succumbs to those things that Roth seemingly can not shake: the desperation of the aging man, and an impish bawdiness.

The book is in three chapters. The first deals with Axler as a failed actor, and I'm not sure it rings true. I'm sure Roth did his research, but I was never convinced of Axler's condition. Perhaps that was the point; perhaps Axler only thought he couldn't act, it was entirely in his mind (I'm also at a loss to imagine an American actor who achieves fame and fortune performing in classics--actors who are well-known for stage work are invariably musical-comedians). That being said, Roth captures the emotional damage the man suffers, and during his stint at the hospital he meets a woman who is dealing with a husband who abuses her daughter, which is rendered in brisk, frightening strokes.

But the introduction of Pegeen Mike Stapleton (named after a character in Synge's Playboy of the Western World) displays a tin ear. I'm loathe to say she's inauthentic--all lesbians are different like all people are different--but Roth's transformation of her (the chapter is indeed called "Transformation") seems insensitive. Axler buys her stylish clothes, she gets an expensive haircut, and she thrills to being penetrated by a penis, which she says feels far more alive than fingers or a dildo. Roth isn't gaining ground with feminists in this book.

The third chapter includes some graphic sex, which is not new for Roth and, as literary smut goes, is pretty hot. The couple pick up another woman for a threesome, which predictably leads to emotional disaster (no one in literature can get kinky without being punished). Up until the last few pages, when the couple part, this entire book could read like an old man's fantasy during an afternoon nap--what can be more satisfying than seducing a lesbian and then making her look feminine? Not only that, but the old goat steals her away from another woman, who stalks her, leading to an altercation in which the old man turns his shotgun on the jilted lover.

However ridiculous this book can get, it's still Philip Roth, and that means it's gorgeously written. You will likely be appreciating the impeccable nature of his sentences even as you're rolling your eyes.