Just the bare bones

It is impossible (as I prove in this sentence) to review Philip Roth without mentioning the surge of creativity that began when the author was around 60 and which now sees him publishing a novel every year (his next one, Nemesis, is already finished). However, I would argue that it is only recently that we have seen Roth’s genuine late style. In three of his last four books — Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008) and this one, The Humbling — there has been a shift towards winter in his writing. Those are short works, lacking the manic humour that energised Roth’s earlier fiction. Gone is the narrative scope of books such as Sabbath’s Theater (1995), and instead we have just one lonely character and his quiet tragedy; the mood is plangent and wanly nostalgic: these books speak of what is lost and what, inevitably, awaits us.

Simon Axler, the protagonist in The Humbling, is the last great American stage-actor, a man huge in both body and voice. Now in his mid-sixties, however, he has lost his spontaneity, and the thought of acting terrifies him. He has a breakdown and institutionalises himself for a month, and after that splits up with his wife and retreats to his farm, leaving Prospero, Othello and Macbeth behind for ever. But then, emasculated and alone, he finds love with a woman 25 years younger, the daughter of old acquaintances, who has been a lesbian all her adult life until, rather surprisingly (about which, more below), she goes to Axler’s place and becomes his girlfriend. Life is suddenly worth living again and Axler no longer feels unmanned by failure; but given the usual tone of late Roth, the reader’s sense that all will not remain well is naturally pertinent.