The Humbling
By Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin, 160 pages, $22
Toward the end of War and Peace, in one of the moments of im-probable stagecraft that Tolstoy contrives so successfully throughout the novel, Andrei is reunited with Natasha, once his intended. Andrei has been badly wounded in the Battle of Borodino, but now that he has Natasha to tend to him and his love for her is rekindled, we sense that their past mistakes have been providentially redeemed.
Then one morning, Natasha discovers that Andrei no longer wants to talk with her and seems even to prefer that she not visit him. In fright she summons his pious sister Mary, and when Mary arrives, expecting to find a weakened, complaisant man, she is shocked to find in his greeting “something almost like hostility.” Andrei has realized that he is going to die, and although he is willing to submit to the ceremonies that attend death, he has surrendered himself to, as Tolstoy puts it, “that aloofness to all things earthly that is so fearful to a living man.” He feels only antagonism for anyone who would try to keep him attached to life.
A preoccupation with death has been at the forefront of Philip Roth’s books for some time now; but in truth, something of Andrei’s cold hostility toward the things of the world has been an animating force in all his books. Whether such antagonism is shown in the antic, kvetching contempt of his youthful work or the philosophical, seasoned scorn of his mature tomes, the ongoing story of Philip Roth’s 30 novels has been one of renunciation. We have seen one after another of his fictional alter egos renounce parents, ancestry, the traditions and expectations of a provincial upbringing, wives, lovers, children, Judaism, and most famously, every puritanical sexual taboo ever imposed on the American suburbs (except, of course, homosexuality, lest you get any ideas about the author). In The Dying Animal (2001), the aging epicure David Kepesh is reminded of a line from Joseph Conrad: “He who forms a tie is lost”; to Roth, he who severs a tie is heroic.
This theme has scarcely changed from his first full-length novel, tellingly titled Letting Go (1962), to 2008’s Indignation, in which the only character who momentarily rises out of bleak circumstances is a mother who threatens to divorce her husband rather than care for him as he succumbs to madness and senility. It is the sign of a “strong woman.” The more ruthless the rupture, the braver the act.
It’s natural, then, that Simon Axler, the beleaguered hero of Roth’s latest book, The Humbling, should come to view suicide as another feat of strength. Axler finds the impetus to perform “this most extraordinary act” in the example of a housewife who has murdered her abusive husband, and so become for him “the benchmark of courage.” In The Humbling, it’s no longer the social and psychological trappings of life that one must unflinchingly cast away, but life itself.
Axler, a renowned stage actor in his mid-60s, discovers that he can no longer perform. His abrupt erosion of confidence leads to a nervous breakdown, and his spoiled wife leaves him. After a stint in an institution, some hope returns to Axler’s life when he begins a relationship with a 40-year-old woman named Pegeen. Pegeen is a lesbian (knowing not the pleasures of the penis but of its “grotesque inversion,” as Roth puts it in a one-for-old-times burst of political incorrectness), and Axler sets about molding this tomboy Galatea into his ideal of feminine beauty. His hopes for Pegeen become increasingly irrational and culminate in an almost hallucinatory episode in which Axler decides he wants children in spite of his age (and Pegeen’s age, although that even greater obstacle is never mentioned). At this point, Pegeen decides she’s made a mistake and leaves him. Emboldened by the avenging housewife, Axler kills himself.
In its stringent, predetermined construction (the book’s last page is clearly telegraphed in the first), The Humbling is a pendant to Roth’s slight 2004 novel Everyman, in which a nameless protagonist is tormented by the specter of a death without illumination and then, indeed, dies alone and unenlightened. Yet what most unites these books, as well as the two intervening novels—Exit Ghost (2006) and Indignation (2008), both of which are longer but only because they’re padded by vast tracts of stem-winding oratory—is not a passionate vision of mortality but the hostile aloofness of a writer who has become supremely indifferent to the world. Each book suffers from the diminishing yield of a lifetime of renunciations.
The surest sign of this diminution is a new and dismaying dependence on platitudes. These late books use them almost as mottoes. “Just take it as it comes,” the aggrieved main character repeatedly tells himself in Everyman. “You do what you have to do” is Marcus Messner’s refrain in Indignation. The clichés are even more prolific in The Humbling, which begins, “He’d lost his magic. The impulse was spent.” Later, Axler tells himself, “I’ll always be unlike anyone else because I am who I am.” Still later, Axler remarks, “You can get very good at getting by on what you get by on when you don’t have anything else,” then concludes, “the momentum of a life is the momentum of a life.”
Had Roth encountered tautologies such as these when he led writing workshops in the 1960s, he would have savagely proscribed them, but here they’re inflated with a sham profundity that has nothing to do with their meanings (like the current blogosphere bromide “it is what it is,” they mean literally nothing) and everything to do with the stature of the man who wrote them.
This straining for universality does similar harm to the book’s dialogue, once Roth’s long suit. There is no attempt to differentiate, much less evoke, the characters by their voices. Their utterances instead have an awkward grandiosity that calls to mind academic translations of Greek choruses: “I had lived for so long in the constraints of caution” or “It’s we who endow her with the power to wreck.” When Pegeen leaves Axler, he shouts, “You cannot nullify everything!” This is, to put it mildly, not the way any human being speaks.
Roth has previously demonstrated that he knows how the nightmares of death and loss can be embedded in recognizable quotidian realities. In his shattering Patrimony, the 1991 memoir about his 86-year-old father’s doomed struggle with a brain tumor, Roth gave us the wonderful phrase “domesticating the terror.” Just hours after learning the details of a 10-hour surgical procedure that would entail drilling through his skull and lifting his brain, Roth’s father picks a fight with his girlfriend Lil about the correct way to prepare soup. You feel in the absurdly petty spat all of this man’s fear and frustration, his debility and his stubborn defiance:
After setting our three places at the table, he returned to the kitchenette and stood next to [Lil] over the saucepan. She kept insisting the soup wasn’t hot yet and he kept insisting it had to be—it didn’t take all day to heat up a can of vegetable soup. This exchange was repeated four times, until his patience—if that is the word—ran out and he pulled the pot off the burner and, leaving Lil empty-handed at the stove, came into the dining room and poured the soup into the bowls and onto the place mats and over the table.
There is nothing remotely comparable to the power of this scene in The Humbling, because Simon Axler’s trials are expressed only in generalities; the actor who can no longer act exists principally as a metaphor. When Roth is obliged to account for the actual world, as here when Pegeen prepares dinner, he can’t rouse himself to do more than list ingredients:
There was a chunk of Parmesan cheese in the refrigerator, there were eggs, there was some bacon, there was a half a container of cream, and with that and a pound of pasta she made them spaghetti carbonara.
It’s only in his trademarked sex scenes that Roth emerges from such listlessness, and there’s a certain embarrassing transparency in the hearty energy the book suddenly acquires when Pegeen hauls out her bag of sex toys (although the insidious reliance on clichés is still apparent, as we learn that Pegeen “carried things to the limit”). A green rubber phallus is described with more zeal and embellishment than are any of the people. Sex is what Roth’s characters have never renounced; their terror is that it will renounce them, at which point they can take refuge in the imagination (much of Exit Ghost is an impotent Nathan Zuckerman’s fantasized flirtation with a young woman) or, like the nameless protagonist of Everyman, quietly die. The libido is life’s fuel gauge. In The Humbling, moreover, sex is the subtle battleground where Axler hopes to assert control over Pegeen. When he invites another woman to join them (“This was not soft porn,” we are usefully informed), he makes himself irrelevant to Pegeen, and therefore disposable. Here at least, in the realpolitik of screwing, there are vestiges of narrative complexity, never mind that the stimulus for it seems to have been purely prurient.
Yet on the whole, The Humbling, like the three books before it, is so thin and tendentious that it seems a wonder Roth bothered to write it. There could have been precious little discovery in the labor. But of course there is one more thing that Roth has never repudiated, and that is the work of writing. Here is the paradox of these late works. So long as his faculties allow him to perform, Roth must write; but having detached himself from everything that might constrict his freedom to work, he has almost nothing left to write about.
He is, like the allegorical figures of these last books, a man alone with himself and his mortality. When Andrei forsakes Natasha in War and Peace, he is guided by the belief that “death is an awakening”—a belief Roth does not entertain, of course. For Jews, alternately, the consolation of immortality is found in family, in perpetuation, but this, too, Roth has forsworn (Simon Axler’s manic desire to propagate is for Roth a sign of his frailty and desperation). The sole remaining means of outmaneuvering death, then, is through the magic of prophecy—through canonization. And in these formulaic winter tales, we can sense a writer with an anxious eye on his own legacy.
Hence his animus for critics and literary biographers (the villain of Exit Ghost is one such biographer, and it’s Roth’s preemptive strike on the ambitious tyros who will no doubt begin grubbing through his letters and journals in search of juicy scandal the second he dies). And so the poignant frequency with which Roth invokes immortal writers, especially Shakespeare. When George Bernard Shaw was 93, he wrote a cheeky little puppet play called Shakes Versus Shav, and the same earnest association is intended in the gravedigger scene of Everyman, the title of Exit Ghost, and the many haphazard allusions to Lear and Prospero in The Humbling.
The comparison is legitimate in one sense, because Shakespeare had a late style, too. We see it most clearly in plays such as Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale, in which the plot arcs seem artificially rigged and the characters one-dimensional. John Updike, no stranger to late style, wrote that a “silvery chill blows through these romances”; and surely their designation as “tragicomedies” is more a telltale of Shakespeare’s ambivalence than a meaningful category. Except in the poetry, which remained exquisite to the end, these are almost thoughtlessly conventional dramas.
The same drifting and flattening is evident in the late works of Philip Roth. The nimbly engrossing fugues of satire, tragedy, autobiography, and fantasy in The Counterlife (1986) and Operation Shylock (1993) are scaled back to a few simple, generically orotund notes, and there are certainly no more of the virtuoso leaps of imagination found in his most widely loved novel, 1997’s American Pastoral. The only real presence in these grim, portentous books is Roth himself, old and ceaselessly self-regarding—an important writer attempting to cap his career by the harsh and confining terms he has set throughout his life. The intellectual interest in a book like The Humbling comes from observing Roth’s attempts to this end. And the pathos springs from the feebleness of his effort.
