Philip Roth is one of my very favourite authors, so it pains me to say that The Humbling is a catastrophic failure on almost every level. It’s a slight book, both physically and artistically. It’s difficult to understand Roth’s motivation for publishing such a pale imitation of his greatest work.
I don’t subscribe to the notion that Roth’s work has been deteriorating since he completed the American Trilogy with The Human Stain. In particular I thought Exit Ghost deserved its place in the Zuckerman series, and I like both Everyman and Indignation. The Plot Against America less so.
But it’s hard to resist the idea that Roth is no longer operating at his best when confronted with such a poor excuse for a novella as this.
As with Exit Ghost, Roth’s protagonist becomes sexually obsessed with a much younger woman, this time a lesbian, the daughter of his old friends. Simon Axler is a famous actor who has lost his ability to perform on stage, has chronic back ache and has increasingly realistic fantasies of suicide. He checks himself into a mental institution before retreating to his upstate New York home.
Given that this is Roth, he’s daring us to decode this as autobiography. In this schema, the old actor is Roth, struggling to produce work that can stand comparison with his best. Roth’s old hubris is still cranked up to eleven, given that, unlike Axler, he doesn’t refrain from publishing as his protagonist does from appearing on the stage. We know that Roth has suffered debilitating back pain and has an upstate New York house that he inhabits in magnificent isolation.
How tempting to think that Roth in simply indulging in some light wish-fulfilment by giving his alter ego a fruity, highly sexed converted lesbian as a live-in lover. But of course our QI style obvious alarm should go off here. He can’t be doing that, can he? Isn’t he just playing another one of his semi-autobiographical fiction games with us?
His handling of the lesbian characters is going to be the subject of some controversy. There are four in total. The first abandons her lover – Pegeen – in order to begin gender reassignment as a man, incuding growing a moustache. The second is Pegeen, who becomes Axler’s lover in response to her abandonment. She brings her full stock of sex toys with her, naturally including her strap-on. At this point, it becomes apparent that Roth’s conception of lesbianism is roughly that of a fourteen year old boy reading his copy of Nuts magazine.
It soon transpires that Pegeen has had another affair – this time with the dean of the college at which she teaches – and the rejected lover has become vengeful. She’s the textbook bunny boiler, and Axler confronts her with his shotgun in an absurd scene. (Roth’s magic still exists, somewhere deep inside this scene, because the existence of the shotgun, and Axler’s readiness to threaten intruders with it, presages events later in the book.)
Meanwhile, Axler and Pegeen spice up their sex lives by introducing an element of fantasy in the form of a girl Pegeen has seen changing for swimming at her college. She describes her to Axler (I dread to have to say this, but she’s shaven; I mean, could it get any more embarrassingly teenaged than this?) and he imagines her joining them.
Finally, Alxer and Pegeen pick up an inebriated young woman in a bar, drive her back to his house and have a threesome – involving strap-ons of course. Our compliment of lesbians is complete. Only Pegeeen is given any emotional roundness; the others are mere sexual beings, and we never discover anything else about them.
While thrilled by this escapade sexually – I mean who wouldn’t be? – Axler is worried that he has now lost Pegeen, even though she has admitted to affairs with two other women during the course of her affair with Axler. And so it turns out. Axler is carried away with a fantasy of having a child with Pegeen, and goes to the lengths of consulting a doctor about the chances of birth defects when fathering a child at his advanced age. When the affair with Pegeen ends, he is distraught, and his thoughts turn back to suicide.
There are elements of what could have become a great novel here. An artist who is suddenly no longer able to function either mentally or physically (although he’s functioning fine sexually), and who cannot see a way to live his life without their art. If this had been all The Humbling was about, it would perhaps have been worthy to take its place among Roth’s masterworks.
Roth has abandoned the structural daring of his earlier novels – The Counterlife in particular – but there are still subtleties of technique here, like us hearing of Pegeen’s meetings with her parents through her reports of them to Axler, so that Roth can show us both Pegeen and Axler’s reactions to them when only one of them was actually present.
As ever with Roth, the style is wonderfully natural, although there are one or two very strange slips in sentence order. But, knowing what a fine technician Roth is, there can only be one reason that a novel about suicide is narrated in the third person rather than the first, so there is more a sense of inevitability about the end of the book than there perhaps should be. Thankfully, Roth has not lost his ability to describe sex acts honestly, rather than trying to pretty them up with literary language, so cocks are cocks and cunts are cunts. Clearly, the second of those words is highly charged when used by a man to describe the anatomy of a woman, especially if it is a male author placing the word in the mouth of a female character. Again, Roth treads a fine line between honesty and prurient misogyny.
At only 140 pages, this is a very quick book to read, which is a relief really. (No, not that kind of relief, you filthy lot.) Its enormous weakness lies in the treatment of the affair between Pegeen and Axler. Why did she have to be a lesbian? Couldn’t her leaving him for a younger man have worked just as well to unhinge Axler? There is no way that this can be taken as Roth’s attempt to understand lesbians, and has nothing to do with an examination of homosexuality generally (while Axler is happy to sodomise Pegeen – naturally she loves it – he is not willing for her to do the same to him with her strap-on). The fact is that it’s just not possible to see it any other way than an ageing writer working out his fantasies in public. (At one point, while Pegeen and the other woman in the threesome are hard at it, the narrator tells us ‘this isn’t soft porn’, which seems to me to be protesting a little too much.) It’s your classic dad at the disco stuff.
It’s sad to see such a lamentable piece of fiction from Roth’s pen. His reputation is, of course, entirely secure, but that makes it even worse. There’s nothing new here, no innovation or experiment, so it seems entirely unnecessary for Roth to have published it. I wish he hadn’t.
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