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Summary
Summary
Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of Philip Roth's startling new book. A leading American actor of his generation, Simon has lost his magic, his talent, and his assurance. When he goes on stage he feels like a lunatic. His confidence has drained away; he imagines people laughing at him. His wife has gone, his audience has left him, and his agent can't persuade him to make a comeback.
Into this shattering account of terrifying self-evacuation bursts a counterplot of unusual erotic desire, a consolation so risky and aberrant that it points toward a darker and more shocking end. In this long day's journey into night, told with Roth's inimitable urgency, bravura, and gravity, all the ways that we persuade ourselves of our solidity, all our life's performances - talent, love, sex, hope, energy, reputation - are stripped off.
Author Notes
Philip Milton Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey on March 19, 1933. He attended Rutgers University for one year before transferring to Bucknell University where he completed a B.A. in English with highest honors in 1954. He received an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1955.
His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, received the National Book Award in 1960. His other books include Letting Go, When She Was Good, Portnoy's Complaint, My Life as a Man, The Ghostwriter, Zuckerman Unbound, I Married a Communist, The Plot Against America, The Facts, The Anatomy Lesson, Exit Ghost, Deception, Nemesis, Everyman, Indignation, and The Humbling. He won the National Book Critic Circle Awards in 1987 for his novel The Counterlife and in 1992 for his memoir Patrimony: A True Story. He won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1993 for Operation Shylock: A Confession and in 2001 for The Human Stain, the National Book Award in 1995 for Sabbath's Theater, and the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for American Pastoral. He stopped writing in 2010. He died from congestive heart failure on May 22, 2018 at the age of 85.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Roth's latest reflection on sex, aging, and death switches from Roth stand-in Nathan Zuckerman to fading actor Simon Axler. Convinced his talents are ebbing away, Simon embarks on an ill-fated romance with a young lesbian by way of what? Consolation? Distraction? Masochism? The usually reliable Dick Hill falters, however, flattening Roth's characters and smothering some of the novel's metaphysical notes. He is particularly artless with Roth's female characters, reducing them to two-dimensional harpies or simps. Hill might have been better off skipping the falsetto tones and concentrating on mastering the subtleties of the story. A Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hardcover (Reviews, Aug. 10). (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The great Roth has always written both short novels and long novels, choosing a length perfectly suited to what he has to say. Thus, his thirtieth book is brief and perfectly so. Soon into its pages, the reader will recall the title of a famous play about Henry II of England, The Lion in Winter. The lion here, increasingly toothless, is sixtysomething Simon Axler, a famous stage and screen actor. Yes, he's famous, but now he is so stultified by uncertainty about his talent and how to execute his craft that he can no long perform. His wife flees, and Simon retires to his upstate New York farm, even checking himself into a psychiatric ward for a short stay. Roth does not labor over the man's distress. Using spare prose, he makes the situation only as poignant as it deserves to be. When Simon takes up with a woman young enough to be his daughter, who is the daughter of old acting friends, Roth again uses concise language to best convey the sadness of what is only a short rehabilitation for Simon, and which ultimately forces his hand in determining how his life will proceed or not. Roth's voice, long heard and long appreciated, remains profound.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2009 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
BUT enough about you, Dear Reader, let's talk about Philip Roth. Or Nathan Zuckerman or David Kepesh or Mickey Sabbath. Or any of the maddeningly, entertainingly and sometimes tediously self-involved heroes whose lives and loves mirror those of their author. A Roth by any other name would still suffer the affliction identified by O. Spielvogel, the fictional psychiatrist an excerpt of whose imagined article, "The Puzzled Penis," introduced the reading world to "Portnoy's Complaint." A condition marked by "extreme sexual longings," compulsive sexual behaviors and "overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration," Portnoy's complaint outgrew its eponymous novel and manifested itself in one Roth protagonist after another. Alexander Portnoy sought relief in raw liver, most memorably the piece he "bought one afternoon at a butcher shop and, believe it or not, violated behind a billboard on the way to a bar mitzvah lesson." But the possibilities and permutations of onanism are limitless. "Into Thin Air," Part 1 of "The Humbling," introduces 65-year-old Simon Axler as he descends into a long wallow of doubt, despair and self-pity. "The last of the best of the classical American stage actors," Axler has suddenly "lost his magic." "His talent was dead." Cast as Macbeth and Prospero at the Kennedy Center, he fails so spectacularly at the double bill that he slides into a depression severe enough to frighten off his long-suffering wife. Left alone in his house in the country, Axler fears taking his own life and arranges for his admission to a psychiatric hospital. He remains a patient for 26 days, in need of care but unable to believe in his own suffering any more than he had in the emotions of the characters he can no longer play. A "man deprived of himself," "a self-travesty grounded in nothing," Axler can imagine only one form of potency. "Suicide is the role you write for yourself," he advises his fellow patients. "All carefully staged - where they will find you and how they will find you." As it unfolds, "The Humbling," Roth's 30th book, is not only the familiar pairing of an older man obsessed with his deterioration and a younger woman whose sexuality promises rejuvenation - "Exit Ghost," "The Dying Animal" - but also a Pygmalion story. "The Transformation," as the second part of this short novel is titled, presents Axler with a woman to groom - to help her become "a woman he would want." Pegeen Mike Stapleford, "a girl-boy," "a child-adult" and the daughter of old acting friends, is 25 years younger than Axler. A lesbian with a trail of wounded lovers raging in her wake, she has more than enough sexual energy to make up for Axler's eviscerated state. Having materialized out of nowhere, Pegeen walks in, bandages Axler's hand after he trips and cuts it and gives him a glass of water, a simple kindness that prompts him to reflect how bereft of such gestures his life has been of late. "How long have you been out here without anyone else?" Pegeen asks. "Long enough to be lonelier than I ever thought I could be," Axler says. Too despondent to shop or eat, Axler just happens to have all the ingredients necessary for Pegeen to whip up a dinner of spaghetti carbonara. A little Schubert on the stereo, a shared bottle of wine and presto, Pegeen allows him to feel "the strength in her well-muscled arms." Then she unzips her jeans and has sex with "a man for the first time since college." Wow. This must happen to a lot of depressed people. Never mind about electroconvulsive therapy. Pegeen is enough of a shock that Axler immediately forgets his languishing, possibly dead acting career and the excruciating spinal condition that makes it necessary for Pegeen to always be, um, on top, and devotes himself to buying clothes and accessories for his now formerly androgynous lover. Goodbye "sport bras" and "flannel pajamas." Hello "satin babydolls," Prada shoes and cashmere sweater sets. Goodbye barbershop bob and hello expensive Manhattan hairstyle, a "look that gave her precisely the right cared-for devil-may-care air of slight dishevelment." "It was an orgy of spoiling and spending that suited both of them just fine." Still, you can take the girl out of the boy, but you can't take the boy out of the girl. Or is it the other way around? Pegeen moves in on the weekends, and Axler gives her his ex-wife's study to rehab for herself. Naturally, being - having been? - a lesbian, "she had all the tools necessary for stripping wallpaper at her house." And, like all gay women, she has a "small plastic bag of sex toys," among them a "strap-on leather harness" into which she inserts a "green rubber dildo." When Pegeen cheats on Axler, twice, it's with one and then another blonde ponytailed pitcher she seduces from the sidelines of a local softball game - because where else would an experienced, predatory lesbian go for eager, young tomboys to corrupt? YOU don't have to be gay to find such stereotyping offensive. The bedroom frolics inspired by something as lurid and ludicrous as a green dildo make for embarrassing reading not because of the caliber of their sexiness, but because they demean everyone involved. Including the reader, who is forced into the position of voyeur and thereby made complicit in a vision that doesn't allow a lesbian to be anything more than a collection of clichés. Representing her sexual orientation - as well as her gender, duplicitous daughter of Eve! - Pegeen is amoral, capricious and cruel. "The Last Act," Part 3 of "The Humbling," is the end Axler foresaw when he asked Pegeen - just three pages before the fateful haircut - if it wouldn't be a good idea "before hearts get broken, for us to back off?" He knows their relationship is one in which his infatuation will weaken him even as it gives her the strength to betray him. "And when she is strong and I am weak," he tells himself, "the blow that's dealt will be unbearable." But it's too late. Hurtling into the decadent phase of their affair, and trying to keep his omnivorous lover satisfied, Axler takes Pegeen to a bar where he picks up a drunk and "buxom blonde with an extensive body and a kind of ready-made Nordic prettiness." The two conspirators take "Tracy" home for a threesome that reveals Pegeen as a "magical composite of shaman, acrobat and animal," and Roth as a writer unable to resist exploring every tired male fantasy. Great writers write trivial books. John Updike, for example, gave us not only the Rabbit novels, but also lesser works like "The Witches of Eastwick." But no matter if the plot was silly or the characters implausible, Updike presented them in language that was both considered and fluid. His minor books are almost troublingly well written. In contrast, when the conceit isn't worth the effort, Roth doesn't expend it. A lazy work, "The Humbling" lacks its author's genius - all that would help us, as it has so many times before, to forgive him his prejudices and blind spots. Kathryn Harrison's most recent book, "While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family," will be published in paperback this month.
Guardian Review
"There was a time when intelligent people used literature to think," wrote Amy Bellette in a letter in Philip Roth's 2007 novel Exit Ghost. "That time is coming to an end." How enthusiastically Roth himself endorsed this position was not entirely unambiguous - Bellette, an elderly woman whose mental processes had been ravaged by a brain tumour, might in any case have been acting as the mouthpiece of a long-dead writer - but he put the words out there, folding them into a larger argument about the ethics and intellectual purpose of literary biography and the perils of mistaking gossip for criticism. There was, undoubtedly, an element of challenge - an instruction to readers to think, to be "alone with the books, to make of them what they would on their own". Given that Exit Ghost, alongside Everyman and now The Humbling, is part of a suite of late novels that derive their momentum and urgency from the prospect of decay and the ebbing of personal power, it is no surprise that Roth should make a case for reading with a minimum of background chatter. He has something to say, and he wishes to say it. What, then, to make of a novella that chooses as its focus the bewildered losses of an ageing actor, a man who, on discovering that he has become "a self-travesty grounded in nothing", develops a fear of the words "thin air", as spoken by Prospero, sensing in them "an obscure indictment"? Or who, terrorised by feelings of inauthenticity and fraudulence, quits the stage merely to launch himself into a sexual and romantic liaison so comprehensively doomed that his appetite for it can only seem like self-slaughter? If this is literature that we can use to make us think, then what direction does its creator want us to head off in? Simon Axler, "the last of the best of the classical American stage actors", a 65-year-old with Falstaff and Vanya and Peer Gynt safely under his belt, has lost it. Not so much humbled as utterly humiliated, he has crashed - ostentatiously, dramatically - in a demanding double bill of The Tempest and Macbeth. His subsequent nervous collapse is punctuated by the departure of his wife, a former ballerina whose career-ending injury has left her more pathetic than erotic, and a brief stay in a psychiatric hospital. There, Simon's crisis is given a little more perspective, first by the disturbingly banal conversations of a group of failed would-be suicides, and then by the more cogent account of a middle-aged female patient who one afternoon discovered her husband abusing his eight-year-old stepdaughter. She, too, has been undone by an inability to act; unlike Simon, her paralysis has implications and consequences that will never cease. Simon, perhaps taking the hint, decides that the only sensible thing for him to do is to shut up shop altogether. Back at his remote farmhouse in upstate New York, his most meaningful interaction with another living creature comes when he witnesses how little an ailing possum needs to furnish his lair: "Six sticks. So that's how it's done, Axler thought. I've got too much. All you need are six." Thus far, we are more or less with Roth, unpicking the similarities and contrasts he sketches - and even at its most intricate and resonant, this narrative is only ever a sketch - between different kinds of action, different varieties of protagonist and audience; and reflecting on how much we are allowed to read into such a strikingly unadorned presentation of an artist whose confidence - significantly described as his ability to listen - suddenly deserts him, and leaves him at the mercy of "the omnipotence of caprice". How, though, to stay with him through the novella's next act? Retreats, in fiction if not in fact, are made to be penetrated, so it is little surprise when a figure from Axler's past turns up out of the blue, nor even that she is the daughter of old acting friends. That she is a 40-year-old lesbian who, abandoned by a lover whose next port of call is a gender reassignment clinic, has decided to make a leap into heterosexuality is more startling. But when we find that Pegeen - named after a character in The Playboy of the Western World - has deliberately selected Simon for her experiment in sexuality, despite knowing next to nothing of his circumstances, or him, their affair begins to look like a horribly forced device. As it unfolds, each makes a victim of the other; he making her over into what sounds like a parody of the beautifully turned-out woman ("a little clinging black jersey skirt, a red cashmere sleeveless shell . . . and on her feet a pair of pointy black slingbacks cut to show the cleavage of the foot"), she importing sex toys and women both real and imaginary into their bed and, thereby, eventually unmanning him. What begins as a meditation on the source of artistic power and the artist's apparent helplessness to maintain it ends, then, as a lament for the loss of sexual power. This is clearly deliberate and not, in itself, completely spurious: few, surely, would argue that there is no connection between the two. But Roth's perplexing determination to vulgarise his narrative strips The Humbling of its own power: where he seeks to be nuanced, he too frequently appears trite; where he attempts to be brazen, he comes across as pointlessly crude. Sentences that are dismayingly free of Roth's characteristic humour and mischief pile up in a shakily fabular framework but never manage to animate the story's characters nor foreground its larger intentions. In spite of a final twist that delivers a much-needed emotional jolt, The Humbling falls into a trap that one cannot believe its author wished for it, nor that he hadn't the skill to avoid: it fails to give us enough to think about. To order The Humbling for pounds 11.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846. Caption: article-clarkroth.1 Simon Axler, "the last of the best of the classical American stage actors", a 65-year-old with Falstaff and Vanya and Peer Gynt safely under his belt, has lost it. Not so much humbled as utterly humiliated, he has crashed - ostentatiously, dramatically - in a demanding double bill of The Tempest and Macbeth. His subsequent nervous collapse is punctuated by the departure of his wife, a former ballerina whose career-ending injury has left her more pathetic than erotic, and a brief stay in a psychiatric hospital. There, Simon's crisis is given a little more perspective, first by the disturbingly banal conversations of a group of failed would-be suicides, and then by the more cogent account of a middle-aged female patient who one afternoon discovered her husband abusing his eight-year-old stepdaughter. She, too, has been undone by an inability to act; unlike Simon, her paralysis has implications and consequences that will never cease. Simon, perhaps taking the hint, decides that the only sensible thing for him to do is to shut up shop altogether. Back at his remote farmhouse in upstate New York, his most meaningful interaction with another living creature comes when he witnesses how little an ailing possum needs to furnish his lair: "Six sticks. So that's how it's done, Axler thought. I've got too much. All you need are six." - Alex Clark.
Kirkus Review
Another concise, bruising examination of sexual obsession in early old age from Roth (Indignation, 2008, etc.). A series of disastrous stage performances have persuaded much admired 65-year-old actor Simon Axler thatnot unlike, not at all unlike Shakespeare's Prosperohe has "lost his magic." The complex dnouement that follows this crisis of recognition shows us multiple facets of Simon's "humbling." His bitter insistence that his talent has fled him is challenged in a superbly animated conversation with his longtime agent, a stubborn spirit urging Simon to fight to reclaim what's his. During an illuminating stay at a psychiatric hospital, Simon measures his own pain and loss against the sufferings of a frail fellow patient betrayed by her monstrously selfish husband. In the novel's centerpiece section, Simon has a serpentine though rejuvenating affair with 40-year-old Pegeen Mike, a "reformed" lesbian attracted by the stability and the financial resources of this seductive, obviously smitten older man. Their dramatic folie deux plays out the only way it can, fulfilling the subtle promises of its early scenes. Roth connects the dots precisely and ruthlessly, allowing Simon to realize that "he could no more figure out how to play the elderly lover abandoned by the mistress twenty-five years his junior than he'd been able to figure out how to play Macbeth." Allusive, elusive and peppered with mordant wit to a downright Strindbergian degreeone of Roth's most eloquent, painful and memorable books. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Simon Axler wowed theater critics with his outsize talent and persona for 40 years, taming major roles from Shakespeare to Chekov to Miller, but one evening at the Kennedy Center, he suffers a meltdown so terrifying and complete that he consigns himself to an institution for a month of group, art, and physical therapies. The blockage cannot be explained away through normal psychiatric channels, so Axler retreats to his country estate, where he fantasizes about the shotgun in the attic, unable to summon the courage to play the role of a man committing suicide. An unexpected visit from Pegeen Stapleford, the daughter of old friends and 25 years his junior, sets the stage for a recurring Roth theme (The Dying Animal, Exit Ghost), the pathos of the aging artist seeking revitalization through an all-encompassing sexual liaison. Verdict Roth, the incomparable recipient of every major literary award, has written a sorrowful novella. Those of us who believe that he is one of the greatest living American writers will continue to do so, but if 60 is the new 40, readers may tire of his bleak insistence that artistic productivity ends so early. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/09.]-Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1. Into Thin Air He'd lost his magic. The impulse was spent. He'd never failed in the theater, everything he had done had been strong and successful, and then the terrible thing happened: he couldn't act. Going onstage had become agony. Instead of the certainty that he was going to be wonderful, he knew he was going to fail. It happened three times in a row, and by the last time nobody was interested, nobody came. He couldn't get over to the audience. His talent was dead. Of course, if you've had it, you always have something unlike anyone else's. I'll always be unlike anyone else, Axler told himself, because I am who I am. I carry that with me--that people will always remember. But the aura he'd had, all his mannerisms and eccentricities and personal peculiarities, what had worked for Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya--what had gained Simon Axler his reputation as the last of the best of the classical American stage actors--none of it worked for any role now. All that had worked to make him himself now worked to make him look like a lunatic. He was conscious of every moment he was on the stage in the worst possible way. In the past when he was acting he wasn't thinking about anything. What he did well he did out of instinct. Now he was thinking about everything, and everything spontaneous and vital was killed--he tried to control it with thinking and instead he destroyed it. All right, Axler told himself, he had hit a bad period. Though he was already in his sixties, maybe it would pass while he was still recognizably himself. He wouldn't be the first experienced actor to go through it. A lot of people did. I've done this before, he thought, so I'll find some way. I don't know how I'm going to get it this time, but I'll find it--this will pass. It didn't pass. He couldn't act. The ways he could once rivet attention on the stage! And now he dreaded every performance, and dreaded it all day long. He spent the entire day thinking thoughts he'd never thought before a performance in his life: I won't make it, I won't be able to do it, I'm playing the wrong roles, I'm overreaching, I'm faking, I have no idea even of how to do the first line. And meanwhile he tried to occupy the hours doing a hundred seemingly necessary things to prepare; I have to look at this speech again, and by the time he got to the theater he was exhausted. And dreading going out there. He would hear the cue coming closer and closer and know that he couldn't do it. He waited for the freedom to begin and the moment to become real, he waited to forget who he was and to become the person doing it, but instead he was standing there, completely empty, doing the kind of acting you do when you don't know what you are doing. He could not give and he could not withhold; he had no fluidity and he had no reserve. Acting became a night-after-night exercise in trying to get away with something. It had started with people speaking to him. He couldn't have been more than three or four when he was already mesmerized by speaking and being spoken to. He had felt he was in a play from the outset. He could use intensity of listening, concentration, as lesser actors used fireworks. He had that power offstage, too, particularly, when younger, with women who did not realize that they had a story until he revealed to them that they had a story, a voice, and a style belonging to no other. The became actresses with Axler, they became the heroines of their own lives. Few stage actors could speak and be spoke to the way he could, yet he could do neither anymore. The sound that used to go into his ear felt as though it were going out, and every word he uttered seemed acted instead of spoken. The initial source in his acting was in what he heard, his response to what he heard was at the core of it, and if he couldn't listen, couldn't hear, he had nothing to go on. He was asked to play Prospero and Macbeth at the Kennedy Center--it was hard to think of a more ambitious double bill--and he failed appallingly in both, but especially as Macbeth. He couldn't do low-intensity Shakespeare and he couldn't do high-intensity Shakespeare--and he'd been doing Shakespeare all his life. His Macbeth was ludicrous and everyone who saw it said as much, and so did many who hadn't seen it. "No, the don't even have to have been there," he said, "to insult you." A lot of actors would have turned to drink to help themselves out an old joke had it that there was an actor who would always drink before he went onstage, and when he was warned "You musn't drink," he replied, "What, and go out there alone?" But Axler didn't drink, and so he collapsed instead. His breakdown was colossal. The worst of it was that he saw through his breakdown the same way he could see through his acting. The suffering was excruciating and yet he doubted that it was genuine, which made it even worse. He did not know how he was going to get from one minute to the next, his mind felt as though it were melting, he was terrified to be alone, he could not sleep more than two or three hours a night, he scarcely ate, he thought every day of killing himself with the gun in the attic--a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun that he kept in the isolate farmhouse for self-defense--and still the whole thing seemed to be an act, a bad act. When you're playing the role of somebody coming apart, it has organization and order; when you're observing yourself coming apart, playing the role of your own demise, that's something else, something awash with terror and fear. Excerpted from The Humbling by Philip Roth All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
