The Humbling [Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged] [MP3 CD]

Philip Roth (Author), Dick Hill (Reader)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2, 2009

Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of Philip Roth’s startling new book. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent, and his assurance. His Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya, all his great roles, “are melted into air, into thin air.” When he goes onstage he feels like a lunatic and looks like an idiot. His confidence in his powers has drained away; he imagines people laughing at him; he can no longer pretend to be someone else. “Something fundamental has vanished.” His wife has gone, his audience has left him, his agent can’t persuade him to make a comeback. Into this shattering account of inexplicable and terrifying self-evacuation bursts a counterplot of unusual erotic desire, a consolation for a bereft life so risky and aberrant that it points not toward comfort and gratification but to a yet 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 convince ourselves of our solidity, all our life’s performances — talent, love, sex, hope, energy, reputation — are stripped off. Following the dark meditations on mortality and endings in Everyman and Exit Ghost, and the bitterly ironic retrospect on youth and chance in Indignation, Roth has written another in his haunting group of late novels.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Bookmarks Magazine

What happens when a man loses the one thing that defines him as a human being? With nods to Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Shaw, Roth's grim new novel explores this question—with varying success. While the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post praised Roth's elegant writing and caustic wit, other reviewers found the novel superficial and oddly lifeless, citing flat characters, undeveloped plot contrivances, a lack of humor, and a hostile portrayal of homosexuality. Even the graphic sex is "coarse" and "dull," according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Though not his best work, The Humbling may appeal to faithful Roth fans; others should pick up one of his earlier novels. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• MP3 CD
• Publisher: Brilliance Audio on MP3-CD; MP3 Una edition (November 2, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1441801014
• ISBN-13: 978-1441801012
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,264,208 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

In the 1990s Philip Roth won America's four major literary awards in succession: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Patrimony (1991), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Operation Shylock (1993), the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater (1995), and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for American Pastoral (1997). He won the Ambassador Book Award of the English-Speaking Union for I Married a Communist (1998); in the same year he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. Previously he won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Counterlife (1986) and the National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959). In 2000 he published The Human Stain, concluding a trilogy that depicts the ideological ethos of postwar America. For The Human Stain Roth received his second PEN/Faulkner Award as well as Britain's W. H. Smith Award for the Best Book of the Year. In 2001 he received the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, given every six years "for the entire work of the recipient." In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians Award for "the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003--2004." In 2007 Roth received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Everyman.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The Humbug, November 8, 2009

By 

Mary Murrey (Houston) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Humbling (Hardcover)

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.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Goes Down Easy, November 1, 2009

By 

Cary B. Barad (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Humbling (Hardcover)

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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing from Such a Master, November 16, 2009

By 

Darcy Gue "kindlegrinder" (Sarasota, FL) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Humbling (Kindle Edition)

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.