Philip Roth - The Humbling

It is a terrible feeling to read a book by your favorite author and wonder whether you should go back and reread their previous works to see whether they were really as good as you remember.

Although Philip Roth’s new novel The Humbling never quite forces this sort of reevaluation, parts of it come awfully close. The book, which is the 30th work of fiction by America’s greatest living writer, is at its heart about an old man’s sexual fantasy. Simon Axler loses his brilliant acting abilities all of a sudden, sending him into a tailspin from which he is only able to begin his recovery after meeting a lesbian named Pegeen Mike.

From there, Roth explores themes of mortality, self-worth, sexual deviancy and the horrors of ageing, all of which have been more adeptly handled in his past stories. In fact, certain scenes in The Humbling’s brief 140 pages draw direct parallels with previous events in Roth’s fiction, and the results are rarely flattering.

The obsession with aging and lost potency that plagues Axler was portrayed by Roth to perfection only three years ago with the modern masterpiece Everyman. And harkening back to nearly the beginning of his literary career, a faux-risky threesome in The Humbling recalls the actually risky threesome—which remains brazen, hilarious, absurd and unapologetic even today—that Alexander Portnoy recounts in the classic masterpiece Portnoy’s Complaint, now 30 years old.

Mentioning these two books brings the main issue with The Humbling out from the darkness. The problem is Roth has written too many great novels about essentially the same themes. In comparison, The Humbling is reduced from being a capable book to something tepid and unfortunate. It is still well-written. It is, in isolation, intriguing. As a novella, it is taut and contained. With all that he has done already, what need is there for this?