The Humbling

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.

Do Not Go Humbly Doubtless Philip Roth should have won a recent Nobel Prize for literature. Roth's late fiction simply and relentlessly confronts his reader with what too many American writers - think of Fitzgerald who grasped it more fully than Hemingway (who "outlived" him) - have failed to do: depict old age in its wonders, depths, and cruelties. Nick could remind us after his vicarious ride through Gatsby's life, that the vision of a constantly improving future is simply an illusion, and he could write elegiacally about the loss of `his" city (New York, not Paris) and of his own mind in his essays, but his body couldn't withstand his own bingeing assaults on it. Dead at 44, his ghost later emasculated by the insecurities of Hemingway in A Moveable Feast, he could not, regrettably, tell us about the voyage into aging. That was one loss. Our great Jewish writers - Malamud, Bellow, and Roth -- did give us fictional and true visions of what it means to be old. Perhaps because they grew up with some old people around, unlike so many readers in America. Funny that our most influential medium on the young has no rules at all except the inviolable: "Don't dramatize aging or maturity. Keep that face Botoxed!" That's the second loss. (Apologies to Papa Smurf and Grandpa Simpson.) During his long career, Roth occasionally gets angry with his critics and with his own faithful readership. The unknowable source of pain for the writer in The Anatomy Lesson, devastates Zuckerman and may derive from the criticism of the author by a prig-critic, or, it may derive more existentially from the fictional author's books themselves (writing as unrewarded Promethean torture). Then Sabbath's Theatre, the book in which he seems most disappointed with just about everyone, puzzles because the reasons for the attacks are not evident; or even if the reason for the hostility is a defense of obscenity, then the rage of Mickey Sabbath still seems directed at readers who don't care about art. I see The Humbling as coming from the same cloth of these two latter novels - not the cloth of Everyman, Exit Ghost, or Indignation even (which shares some of the above trait but is actually more eulogy and elegy. The failure of our over-Prozacked happy crowd to appreciate the special sorrows of the aged, but to instead pack them off to warehouses (where they are duly stripped of their life's worth, financial and otherwise) will eventually not get us the green light, but bring us all to The Humbling. The book's structure is simple: The first Act is like unto Kafka's Metamorphosis: Venerable actor awakes to nightmare: He has turned into an actor who can no longer perform; less cockroach than Galapagos tortoise. (No Viagra for that!). Second Act: Man stalled by failure to perform is seduced by a dark younger woman, the pages about whom serve a dual purpose of giving the prurient their fix, but tragically further complicating "the humbling" of the failed performer:

I am a HUGE Philip Roth fan. The cadence of his writing and nuance of phrasing just resonates with me. I know this is not true for everyone. So having a new Roth novel is sheer pleasure for me. I appreciate merely immersing myself in his writing style and the flow of words, so I am willing to forgive a lot, including the often self-absorbed reflections and dare I say it, mysogynistic bent. Roth's women often don't treat his protagonist too well. If you like Roth, this little book is a gem, and typically disorienting and disturbing in that wondrous way that Roth has to set things askew and keep us readers wanting more.

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'

Here is another of Philip Roth's slim, late life novels about the slings and arrows of mortality and it's a book you can read in one gulp. His protagonist this time is a well known, successful sixty-five year old actor who has lost his onstage magic. He is embarrassed and driven into retirement after disastrous performances in two Shakespearian plays at the Kennedy Center. His wife leaves him shortly afterward and he has something of a nervous collapse and spends twenty-six days in a mental institution where he befriends one of the female inmates whose eight year old daughter has been sexually abused by her husband. This teaches him that things could be worse, and although he resists his agent's exhortations to return to the stage, he lives a hermit's life in his country house. The book's three chapter titles "Into Thin Air," "The Transformation," and "The Last Act" convey a clear sense of the book's structure. I will say no more about the plot, except that in addition to child abuse and madness, it includes murder, edgy and unusual (though what's really unusual these days?) sexual arrangements, and an anticipated, though still jolting ending. A must read for Roth fans and a "should read" for everyone else. When will this man will the Nobel Prize for Literature?