Book Review: December ’09 | The Beachside Resident

By: Mark James

Article Category: Book Review Leave a Comment

The Humbling
By Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 160 pages; $22

Doesn’t Philip Roth realize that retirement is part of the American dream? At the ripe old age of 76, he’s recently released “The Humbling,” his 30th book and eighth this century, and he has another due for publication in a few months. His latest is the story of an aging actor who has lost his ability — thus the humbling. Could this be Roth foretelling his own artistic demise? Can he be serious?

The story opens with Simon Axler, celebrated stage actor, interpreter of Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov, having lost the art that brought him fame and fortune with a reputation as the “last of the best of the classical American stage actors.” “He’d lost his magic,” the narrator tells us in the opening sentence. Axler begins to contemplate suicide in the same fashion as Ernest Hemingway (coincidence?), his wife leaves him, and he ultimately checks himself into a hospital. While there, he meets Sybil Van Buren, a woman committed by her husband after she witnesses him molesting their young daughter. She tries to convince him to murder the husband, but he can’t be convinced, and Sybil fades away when Axler checks himself out after 26 days.

Simon retreats to a lonely but comfortable existence in his country house until Pegeen Mike Stapleford arrives — a woman 25 years his junior who had “lived as a lesbian since she was twenty-three,” and also happens to be the daughter of old friends. Axler even won the honor of selecting her name in a contest before her birth. What he sees now is not a lesbian, but a “lithe, full-breasted woman of forty.” A relationship — both physical and emotional — develops, and he begins to experience a rebirth of sorts. Pegeen becomes the muse he lost; he flirts with the thought of acting again, and considers fatherhood for the first time. Just when he feels life may be worth living, Pegeen abandons him and all is lost.

Roth has often been unfairly typecast as a chronicler of the Jewish experience in America. Many of his books are about Jews trying to fit into a non-Jewish society in a fashion that sometimes tends towards nihilism. In a broader context, his characters are just outsiders that could ultimately be any minority. Roth never identifies Axler as Jewish, but he is an outsider — an actor whose skill for losing himself in the roles he plays. Once he loses his art, he finds himself in the unfamiliar role of himself, an undeveloped character trying to fit in.

There is ultimately no point to this story, much as Simon Axler can find no point to his life without acting. It’s also a bit short for a novel, almost as if Roth ran out of inspiration and decided to just end it. But given his prolific output of the past decade alone, it is difficult to imagine that it is autobiographical in any way. Even with the brevity and the pointlessness, Roth’s prose is still enjoyable — the work of an author who has not lost the magic. — Mark James