Customer Reviews

The Humbling (Center Point Platinum Fiction (Large Print))

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

Don't get me wrong. Philip Roth's work deservedly belongs in the category of "Great American Literature", if we insist on such a category. I've always eagerly bought almost all his work--willing to pay for the hardback, I couldn't wait to get my hands on his latest book, and his world. I think his best novel is AMERICAN PASTORAL. This is great literature. But lately.... I don't know. Maybe we should call it the Woody Allen Effect. Old writer/auteur who has written classics, great work, has run out of steam and obsessed with himself and sex with younger women--his major driving force--can only write this theme over and over, which may be fascinating to him, but is borish and repetitive to most others. It's amazing that I haven't seen one negative review of Roth's new novel, THE HUMBLING in any major newspaper or magazine.Maybe the fact that the reviews, such as in the NTY's, are so short say something. I think critics are afraid of him.

The novel starts out well enough, interesting in fact... I believe,for some brief period that I'm with the master Roth, but alas, I'm not. My husband put the novel down on page 9 when we learn summarily that the protagonist's wife of twenty-some years, Victoria, has left without any believable reason other that Roth writes that it is so--i.e. her son's drug problem and her inability to put of his demanding, apparently never-ending negativity. "After the Kennedy Center debacle and his unexpected collapse, Victoria fell apart and fled to California to be close to her son." The entire marriage is summarized in about two pages.

The book is an OUTLINE. I would love to read about the protagonist, Simon Axler--an aging man losing his powers,in this case, his ability to get on the stage and pretend, that is to act. My God, what an existential situation! Wouldn't you love to know the gritty details, the unpleasant physical and psychological and quotitian details of his descent into mortality, and the accompanying lack of meaning that fame ultimately offers? But no, we get only a hint of this--a outline of a story that if any unknown writer dared submit would result in a rejection letter, with a possible encourgaging word. But we do get hot sex with a lesbian! I started to feel as if I was in the world of steamy romance novels. And of course this lesbian is no ordinary lesbian, no ordinary woman. Her name is Pegeen, she's a professor, and guess what? Simon knew her as a baby (Shades of Woody Allen again),being friends with her parents. Pageen is now a "lithe, full-breasted woman of forty, although with something of the child still in her..." The very end of the novel is clever, and again we see glimpes of that trickster, the master Roth. But overall the novel is disappointing, and I can only recommend it to Roth fans, who like me, enjoy seeing where he's at.

You can still feel the Rothian magic in this modern tale of one man's agony and struggle to regain his reknowned reputation as a master of stagecraft. Debilitated by physical and emotional pain, the protagonist reveals his innermost torments as he comes across some unforgettable characters who will play decisive roles in his personal drama. Somewhere between a novella and a longish short story, this book is easily digested in one reading and leaves one with much to think about. Can't really ask for more than that.

That one of our two or three best living literary fiction writers -- author of remarkable works like American Pastoral and Sabbath's Theater -- would let this novella be published is sad. Unless it is, as someone else wrote, a joke on us. By a master joker.

The Humbling centers on an aging (60's is that old?), hugely accomplished, long-acclaimed actor who's "lost his talent" as he repeatedly puts it, and is wrestling with suicidal thoughts.

But from the get go, this premise is difficult to accept, primarily because so little meat is put on its bones. How did Axler get here? We don't know. He apparently is concerned enough to voluntarily institutionalize himself for 27 days, and actually shows mild signs of improvement. But then, home again, how can this former lion of a man immediately return to his simplistic loop of "It's over....It's finished....I'm finished forever with happiness..etc. He goes on this way for months, a person we increasingly experience as a soulless stick figure with a mantra-mindedness that is, simply, unconvincing. Where is the psychological, philosophical and/or historical texture needed for our exploration of this dull, whining guy? Where are the vestiges of the man he was until a year earlier?

In comes the intriguing 40 year old woman, who literally appears on his doorstep. Axler had known her slightly as a girl through her parents, and had learned years before that she was a lesbian. When he asks her months after her unexpected knock at the door, "How come you drove over that afternoon?" she says "I wanted to see if you were with someone." Why him? We don't really know. We do learn enough about her to know why she's taking a new look at heterosexuality, but unfortunately the ramifications that unfold offer an embarrassing array of sexual stereotyping that interferes, again, with believability.

Axler lets Pegeen grasp for him and he does the same, thereby immediately feeling "happiness" again. The details of the relationship, particularly the re-making of the lesbian into a "feminine" woman who emerges "coquettishly from the dressing room smiling with delight," ironically recall his past theatrical orientation, as does the scene-making nature of their sex life. Well, okay, this works a bit on his side -- but on hers? Hmmm.

The short book follows with more loosely drawn pages of erotic grittiness and greed that smack more of pulp than Roth's famously and profoundly edgy sexual relationships (thinking back to Sabbath's Theater again, as an example). The offensively good, bad and ugly of homo- versus hetero- becomes the final wrecking ball of the book -- just to remind us that Roth wanted it to end as it began: making fun of us? Himself?

Please, Mr. Roth, tell us what you're really working on. We refuse to believe you have lost YOUR talent.

I read the new Philip Roth novel the other day --- it's just 140 pages, with fewer words than usual per page, so you can knock it off in a few hours --- and I'm still disturbed.

This in an improvement over my reaction when I finished it.

I was shaky. Almost shaking.

I hope you will read 'The Humbling' --- I found it to be Roth's best work in years; sentence for sentence, paragraph for paragraph, he's still the most readable serious writer we've got --- but I have a problem saying much about it.

I didn't see the third and last section ("The Final Act") coming. I didn't want the ending to be what it was. Even afterward, I couldn't accept that this was how the story had to end. And I don't want to spoil it for you by describing it in any way.

I feel the same unease in discussing the second section ("The Transformation"), which also came as a surprise to me. In the interest of having it come as a surprise to you, I will speak no more of it here.

Which leaves me to convince you to read this masterful --- and, as I say, very disturbing --- book by discussing only the 43 pages of the first section ("Into Thin Air").

Well, okay. Simon Axler is one of the great stage actors of his generation. But now he's in his mid-60s, and he's adrift. This is how the book starts:

"He'd lost it. 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 became 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."

There's nothing more subjective than "talent". Maybe Axler's just tired. Maybe he just needs a rest.

He retreats to his house in the country, bringing a gloom thick as the poisonous cloud of a crop-duster. His wife flees. Now he's completely alone. And feeling suicidal. So he checks himself into a mental hospital for a month.

After, his harsh assessment is unchanged: "You're either free or you aren't...I'm not free anymore." Worse, he feels that his talent was a fluke, that all artistic spark is random: "This life's a fluke from start to finish."

He accepts that. Don't think of his as a career cut short, he says. Think how long it lasted.

Axler may be frozen, but Roth isn't --- he can pack a trilogy into a hundred pages. Things happen to Axler, and Axler makes things happen. He's not dead yet. Which means --- this is a Philip Roth book --- there will be a woman.

Alas, I cannot say more without spoiling the book's pleasure --- because it is pleasant to read a book this tight, this efficiently constructed; it's the exact opposite of Ian McEwan's disappointing 200-page shaggy marriage novel, 'On Chesil Beach'. But I can offer some clues.

One is Roth's interest in aging, which is not at all novelistic. In interviews, he's said that he's not looking to create either charmers or complainers; he's seeking reality.

Another hint. This is a book set in the country. In three sections --- three acts, if you will. It is, someone has suggested, a Chekhovian tragedy. Well, recall what Chekhov said about a gun that appears in the first act....

This is a long way from the summer romance of 'Goodbye, Columbus'. But Philip Roth was 26 when he published that. He's 76 now. He's outlived all of his rivals. He's our most prominent novelist. And over 30 books, he's learned how to disturb us --- and keep us reading. "The Humbling" is haunting proof.

This is the first Philip Roth novel I've read. I picked it as an entry point, since it was short and recent and I figured it would give me a taste of his style. I certainly hope that it isn't representative of his work.

In fiction, there's nothing wrong with having unlikable characters, as long as they are interesting. The main characters here aren't. Simon is a washed up actor who seems incapable of any emotion besides self-pity. Pegeen is a cipher, not having much in the way of emotions that the reader can understand, apparently looking for some sort of fulfillment through sexual novelty and never finding anything in particular. These are not necessarily bad *ideas* for characters, but Roth doesn't explore them or flesh them out into anything interesting. Everything he says about them can fit into two sentences like the ones I just wrote.

The plot is simple, tedious, and highly predictable. Simon loses his acting chops, the only thing he cares about, and becomes suicidal. Pegeen comes into his life and they have a lot of weird sex. Then she leaves, and he gets suicidal again, this time enough to succeed. The end. Roth telegraphs every motion well in advance, not making an effort to to depict the action as anything besides a fait accompli. Each particular scene is the same way, playing out predictably from first sentence to last. Again, such a simple and obvious plot might still work if the reader had any interest in the characters. But Roth never gives us any particular reason to care what happens to them.

The stylistic choices do little to help matters. I found myself skipping past the pages of explicit sex, not because they were pornographically titillating, but because they were at once tedious and disgusting. Roth doesn't seem to realize that boring characters having a boring conversation while wearing strap-on dildos are still boring characters having a boring conversation.

There were a few interesting parts of the book, mostly thanks to minor characters. Simon's agent comes for a visit and has as good a conversation as is possible between a real character and a lump of wood. There's a good short story that could be made from this scene. The young woman torn between helplessness and vengeance whom Simon meets in the sanitarium grabs the reader's feelings. I'd much rather read a novel about her.

But then, I'd prefer read any number of novels with characters I can care about, rather than this one about rough character concepts trudging through the outline of a plot.

Generally, second-rate Roth is preferable to first-rate many others. Let me be clear: I have long adored Philip Roth and, since The Counterlife, have considered him to be "our greatest living writer" (a title now so hackneyed it must be set in quotation marks). The Humbling, however, made me entertain uncharacteristically ugly thoughts about the author, for whom literary imagination and the setting down of words - the literal deed of writing - is now, on the evidence of this short piece, more than ever an auto-erotic exercise. (I say "more than ever" because I've often thought Roth must get off on his own writing, but in the pre-Viagra Portnoy era, we didn't have to draw hypotheses about his virility....)

Here Roth goes full bore into one of the great cliches of rutting-hound manhood, an exploration that for the writer must, among other things, qualify as a bent form of wish fulfillment. I won't name the fantasy, a key plot detail the divulging of which constitutes a spoiler, but it's a quick read and readers can decide for themselves. Even a great writer needs sometimes to throttle back on his customary obsessions, or at least redirect them, as he did in The Plot Against America, and locate them inside new framing material.

Had Roth produced The Humbling twenty years ago I might have called it a brave book for its baying forays into unusually perverse terrain. Written at this point in his life, however, and after such literary greatness, it strikes me as a tossed-off piece, something only a Philip Roth could get published, at times seeming stuffed with filler despite its modest 140 small (duodecimo) pages.

And even so, Roth's matter of fact prose pulls me along like a tractor beam; this time, however, what it touched in me was a sense of grim fascination, all the way to an altogether predictable conclusion, reached in a single sitting. I finished thoroughly dispirited and worried that, after so strong a late-in-life run, Roth is a spent imagination and will now deal solely in scabrous sensationalism.

Am I missing something? I don't rule that out. Perhaps before writing these comments I should have taken a week off, returned to the book, reread it. I might have a different reaction. But I don't think so. Instead, I'll look forward with some trepidation to his next - and I would hope, redemptive - effort. But The Humbling? As many an earlier Rothian character might have uncharitably observed: "feh."

The great stage and movie actor Simon Axler is humbled in his mid-sixties when he discovers that he has lost his ability to act. His agonizing leads to his wife leaving him and he enters himself in a twenty some day program in a psychiatric clinic. He meets a young woman there who found her second husband having sex with her infant child from her first husband. The woman wants Axler to kill her husband. After leaving the clinic, he meets a lesbian who lost her lover who decided to go through a sex change operation, remove her breasts and grow a mustache. She gives up her sexual inclinations to have an affair with him, but her parents attempt to break up the relationship because Axler is twenty five years older than her. The two meet a drunken young girl and have a tryst with her. Will these affairs lead to a revival of Axler's ability to act? Will the lesbian be able to remain in a heterosexual relationship? Will her parents succeed in dissuading her from the relationship with Axler? Will the woman from the clinic succeed in having her husband killed? Roth presents this tale in his brilliant, exciting, and beautifully written fashion.

The German novelist Heinrich Bohl once wrote that art is either overpaid or underpaid.
Axler, a stage actor in his sixties, has lost his 'magic'. He lost his self-confidence and self-esteem and probably thinks he's overpaid because others, who earn less, are so more talented than he is (hence the title 'The Humbling'). Off stage, in the real world, he also lost the power to listen to others and lost the ability to inspire them.

For mysterious reasons he has the feeling that he's performing his own life on stage. His very existence has become a play in which he's the key player. A player who wanted to die, while on stage he wanted to live. When his wife left him he made a suicide attempt and became a patient in a psychiatric hospital.

Several months later, after his release from the hospital, he meets a friend from way back and he invites her in his house. She cooks a meal and he feels happy again for the first time since he quit acting.
It's this relationship that will decide whether Axler will perform on stage again which means also to participate in real life again.

In this novel life on stage and real life have often the same meaning: give oneself to others.

Something happens to Simon Axler, a successful actor in his mid-sixties, and he loses his instincts for stage. Concurrently, his marriage collapses and Simon becomes deeply depressed. Concerned about his suicidal thoughts, he checks into a psychiatric hospital, where he establishes a quasi-friendship with a patient whose young daughter has been molested. In a month, Simon stabilizes and is released, but he remains depressed. At this point, his agent appears, urging him to work with an acting coach renowned for rejuvenating dispirited actors. Great parts, such as James Tyrone, are within his reach. But instead of addressing his problems directly, Simon develops a relationship with a 40-year old woman, who has had disturbing effects on her prior lovers.

In telling this story, Roth explores such subjects as performance, instinct, illusion, delusion, and the twisted integrity of the deeply depressed. It's not Roth's best work, because certain elements in the story--molestation, bizarre sexual activity, and cross-generational relationships--are actually distinct subjects, not inverted or inside-out manifestations of the same or similar subjects. As a result, the themes don't tie together with Roth's usual grave discipline and surprising insight.

Nonetheless, THE HUMBLING is yet another demonstration of Roth's masterfully terse style and his unblinking exploration of the plight of his characters. Recommended.

'The Humbling' is a novel about everything that Roth has been writing about since he published `The Plot Against America' (TPAA) in 2004: aging, death, lust in old age, betrayal, loss, grief. And while he will probably never write a long novel like TPAA again, 'The Humbling' is as good as anything he's written since then.

It's true that `The Humbling' is very brief. In fact it may have less words than anything Roth's published in the fifty years since 'Goodbye, Columbus'. But it's still a very good read, better written than his last book ('Indignation'), and more entertaining than either of the other two that Roth published after TPAA. Some bad reviews of 'The Humbling' that I've read had lowered my expectations so much, which may have helped me appreciate it, but I really believe that this is a fine work.

'The Humbling' reminds me of a couple of similarly short, focused novels of Roth's last decade ('The Dying Animal' from 2001 and 'Everyman', 2006); and seems to hit the main themes of those two. It has the same kind of tension and steady movement toward a mysterious conclusion -- and the same commitment on Roth's part to profound honesty and well-paced storytelling. He is "painting what he sees" here in terms of both human behavior and the human heart, which is what good artists are supposed to do, whatever talent remains in their own hands, heart, and mind.

Though there are portentious references in it to Anton Chekhov's plays and the lead character is an actor, 'The Humbling' reads more like a short novel by Ivan Turgenev. Like Chekhov, Turgenev was a great Russian writer from the 19th century, who was highly influential as a prose stylist. Roth's new work is arranged in the style and tragic-romantic mood of Turgenev's 'First Love', 'Asya', and 'Spring Torrents', which also deal with the difficulties of infatuation, inter-generational or cross-cultural love, and the compulsions of lust. Those works are very well known and loved in Russia, and like 'The Humbling' they are are all very honest and mature, and are crafted with great respect for the relationships within literature which interlink the tool of language, the art of storytelling, and reality. If you like 'The Humbling', you might enjoy these works by Turgenev, which are roughly as long as 'The Humbling'.

And if you like Roth's past work and you accept that he's no longer willing or able to write long novels, you won't be disappointed in the 'Humbling'.