With the recent passing of John Updike and J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth now stands as America’s best living post-World War II novelist. His name is not as common as either of his deceased colleagues, but with a Pulitzer and two National Book Awards under his belt, his career is not one to scoff at. Which is perhaps what makes Roth’s most recent novel, The Humbling, that much more disappointing.
This slim novel tells the story of Simon Axler, an aging stage actor, who realizes one day that his talents have dried up. No matter what he does to try and reclaim them, nothing can help him overcome the feeling that he is just an old man who is merely playing dress-up. The loss of his vocation eventually leads him to check into a psychiatric hospital, where he encounters others like himself, broken members of society who have contemplated suicide but can’t bring themselves to actually pull the trigger.
Upon release from the hospital, Simon is presented with a reason to live in the form of Pegeen Stapleford, an attractive, fortysomething lesbian and the daughter of a pair of acting friends. The two begin an affair that gives Simon hope for a brighter future. Hope that might even include a return to the stage. But, as with the tragic outcomes of stories by Shakespeare and countless others, hope is not a friend to Simon Axler.
Roth spins his short narrative with the same ease and care present in all of his other novels, from the greatest to the weakest, but one of the major flaws of his newest work is its compactness. Like his last few novels before this one, The Humbling is largely exposition, with very few fleshed out scenes presenting themselves until mid-way through the book. All of this narration gives the book a rushed and underdeveloped feel that does very little justice to the premise we’re presented with in chapter one. It’s almost as if Roth, feeling the pressure of another year slipping by, just wanted to scribble something off as fast as he could. The book needs room to breathe, room for us to get to know the characters, room for us to see them in quiet moments, away from the world and away from each other. As things stand, character motivations are unclear and often unbelievable. Particularly at the end when Simon is at his lowest. When we most need to believe in the actions of a character, there is the unfortunate temptation to say to him “Things aren’t that bad. Dust yourself off and take it like a man.”
Additionally there is the whole matter of Simon’s affair with Pegeen. The idea of a famous actor suffering an emotional breakdown is interesting, and the idea of him having an affair with a woman twenty years younger than himself is, if not entirely interesting, not entirely boring either. But the idea that this fortysomething woman is a lesbian makes the whole conceit feel contrived to the point of ludicrousness. Human sexuality has always been one of Roth’s favorite topics to explore, but this twist seems like little more than a calculated attempt at raising eyebrows.
More troubling, though, is the book’s vague stance toward suicide. The act is never outright condoned, yet there is not much of an argument against it. And in the case of Simon Axler, it may even stand as a symbol of victory, or a return to a glory formerly lost. Whether this was the intention or not isn’t clear.
Based on his work as a whole, Philip Roth deserves his place in the American canon of great novelists. Books like American Pastoral, The Human Stain, Portnoy’s Complaint and Goodbye, Columbus show us an author in complete control, and a man with a keen sensibility for what lurks beneath humanity’s conscious mind. But The Humbling stands well beneath these others with no staying power, no feeling, and above all, no sense of life. Roth will return later this year with a new book about a small Newark community struggling to endure a polio epidemic during the 1940s. Let’s hope it will be a return to form.
