The humbling

Review by New York Times 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.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 14, 2009]

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Review by 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

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by 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

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by 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.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book 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.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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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.

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