The Humbling

by Philip Roth Narrated by Dick Hill

Overview

Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of Philip Roth's startling book. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent, and his assurance. His Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya, all his great roles, “are melted into air, into thin air.” When he goes onstage he feels like a lunatic and looks like an idiot. His confidence in his powers has drained away; he imagines people laughing at him; he can no longer pretend to be someone else. “Something fundamental has vanished.” His wife has gone, his audience has left him, his agent can't persuade him to make a comeback.

Into this shattering account of inexplicable and terrifying self-evacuation bursts a counterplot of unusual erotic desire, a consolation for a bereft life so risky and aberrant that it points not toward comfort and gratification but to a yet darker and more shocking end. In this long day's journey into night, told with Roth's inimitable urgency, bravura, and gravity, all the ways that we convince ourselves of our solidity, all our life's performances-talent, love, sex, hope, energy, reputation are stripped off.

Editorial Reviews

At the end of Shakespeare's Tempest, Prospero renounces his magic and invites the audience to set him with their applause. For Simon Axler, the actor protagonist of Philip Roth's novel, there is no such renunciation and no such applause. His once considerable talents have seeped away and, now in his 60s, he is left without talent or, worse yet, confidence. Once acclaimed, he sinks first into indolence and dejection, then into an erotic adventure that leaves him even further afield. A starling tour de force by a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.

Elaine Showalter

The bleak conclusion of this parable is inevitable and almost schematic…Yet the book's restrained eloquence makes this gloomy, over-determined ending convincing and powerful. The Humbling is Roth's 30th book, and his seventh in this decade alone. At 76, he is still a literary colossus, whose ability to inspire, astonish and enrage his readers is undiminished.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

Roth's latest reflection on sex, aging, and death switches from Roth stand-in Nathan Zuckerman to fading actor Simon Axler. Convinced his talents are ebbing away, Simon embarks on an ill-fated romance with a young lesbian by way of what? Consolation? Distraction? Masochism? The usually reliable Dick Hill falters, however, flattening Roth's characters and smothering some of the novel's metaphysical notes. He is particularly artless with Roth's female characters, reducing them to two-dimensional harpies or simps. Hill might have been better off skipping the falsetto tones and concentrating on mastering the subtleties of the story. A Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hardcover (Reviews, Aug. 10). (Nov.)

Library Journal

Simon Axler wowed theater critics with his outsize talent and persona for 40 years, taming major roles from Shakespeare to Chekov to Miller, but one evening at the Kennedy Center, he suffers a meltdown so terrifying and complete that he consigns himself to an institution for a month of group, art, and physical therapies. The blockage cannot be explained away through normal psychiatric channels, so Axler retreats to his country estate, where he fantasizes about the shotgun in the attic, unable to summon the courage to play the role of a man committing suicide. An unexpected visit from Pegeen Stapleford, the daughter of old friends and 25 years his junior, sets the stage for a recurring Roth theme (The Dying Animal, Exit Ghost), the pathos of the aging artist seeking revitalization through an all-encompassing sexual liaison. VERDICT Roth, the incomparable recipient of every major literary award, has written a sorrowful novella. Those of us who believe that he is one of the greatest living American writers will continue to do so, but if 60 is the new 40, readers may tire of his bleak insistence that artistic productivity ends so early. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/09.]—Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL

Kirkus Reviews

Another concise, bruising examination of sexual obsession in early old age from Roth (Indignation, 2008, etc.). A series of disastrous stage performances have persuaded much admired 65-year-old actor Simon Axler that-not unlike, not at all unlike Shakespeare's Prospero-he has "lost his magic." The complex denouement that follows this crisis of recognition shows us multiple facets of Simon's "humbling." His bitter insistence that his talent has fled him is challenged in a superbly animated conversation with his longtime agent, a stubborn spirit urging Simon to fight to reclaim what's his. During an illuminating stay at a psychiatric hospital, Simon measures his own pain and loss against the sufferings of a frail fellow patient betrayed by her monstrously selfish husband. In the novel's centerpiece section, Simon has a serpentine though rejuvenating affair with 40-year-old Pegeen Mike, a "reformed" lesbian attracted by the stability and the financial resources of this seductive, obviously smitten older man. Their dramatic folie a deux plays out the only way it can, fulfilling the subtle promises of its early scenes. Roth connects the dots precisely and ruthlessly, allowing Simon to realize that "he could no more figure out how to play the elderly lover abandoned by the mistress twenty-five years his junior than he'd been able to figure out how to play Macbeth."Allusive, elusive and peppered with mordant wit to a downright Strindbergian degree-one of Roth's most eloquent, painful and memorable books.

From the Publisher

Elegant and brutal.... Direct and urgent, a taut and controlled fever-dream that demands to be experienced at a single sitting.... [He] is a master.” —The Los Angeles Times
 
“Convincing and powerful.... At 76, [Roth] is still a literary colossus whose ability to inspire, astonish and enrage his readers is undiminished.” —Elaine Showalter, The Washington Post

“Philip the great, Philip the audacious, the voracious, writes of bottomless hunger—emotional, sexual, existential. When you hear about a new Philip Roth novel, you have to read it.... Roth still has his chops.” —O, The Oprah Magazine
 
“Masterful.... Roth's best work in years; sentence for sentence, paragraph for paragraph, he's still the most readable serious writer we've got.... It's pleasant to read a book this tight, this efficiently constructed.”  —The Huffington Post
 
“Blooms brightly in the extraordinarily fecund garden of his late work.... A swift but piercing, uncluttered but nuanced morality tale.” —“Books We Like,” NPR
 
“The Humbling unfolds in three acts of pristine economy, dramatic lucidity and unstoppable narrative momentum.... The dispassion that has always marked Roth’s narrative voice sometimes achieves the depth and simplicity of the best music or poetry.... The laughter keeps getting quieter and more knowing.” —The Plain Dealer
 
“A vitally important addition to Philip Roth’s already amazing body of work.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“Artfully spry.... With punchy prose.... [The Humbling] is Roth’s best work since Sabbath’s Theater. It’s Goodbye, Columbus for big kids.” —The Dallas Examiner
 
“The novel ... finds traction in familiar Rothian interrogations—of the self’s deviousness, the impossible murkiness of motive, and the performative nature of identity.” —The New Yorker
 
“Roth is a master of pacing.... [He is] a great writer, a great anatomist of passion. His admirers will find much to admire in The Humbling.” —The Oregonian
 
“Succinct and attention-grabbing. . . . Though the novels are shorter these days, they are no less provocative than his early ones.” —Winnipeg Free Press
 
“A daring experiment in late style.” —Slate
 
“The Humbling should be read as a kind of Mortality Trilogy with The Dying Animal and Everyman, two other autumnal works from this great writer. Short, bitter and bracing, they lend the courage to see and endure what is.” —The Dallas Morning News
 
“Roth at his rawest.... Slim, bleak and sexy.... Roth’s writing flows gracefully.” —USA Today
 
“Roth writes movingly.... The compact intensity of Roth’s late fictions suits well the stark truths he explores in The Humbling. Here, he strips a man’s life to its essential movements, onto the light of the stage and off to the darkness of the wings when the curtains come down.” —The Post and Courier

“At 76 [Roth] is still leaving scorch marks on the page.” —Bloomberg News
 
“Forceful, haunting and unnervingly effective.” —The Toronto Star
 
“Compelling.... It takes an artist as gravely ludicrous as Roth to create a body of work in which intertextuality comes to be a brute condition of existence itself.” —The Times Literary Supplement [UK]
 
 “A wild, skittering erotic scherzo.... Anyone who admires the tormented subjectivity, existential dread, winnowed language and corrosive gallows humour of, say, Thomas Bernhard and Samuel Beckett should feel at home in late Roth.... Yes, The Humbling takes his hero down to a naked place where self and skill evaporate: the word ‘nobody’ tolls like a Beckettian bell. But the show for Simon, for Roth, for fiction must go on.” —The Independent [UK]
 
“Masterly.... Powerfully dramatic.... We should be grateful that Roth continues to maintain his concentration on the terrible facts.... [The Humbling] is the most to-the-point, the most necessary work its author has published since The Dying Animal.” —London Review of Books
 
“Gripping.... The intense realism of some of the scenes is shocking and unforgettable.... Worthy of a David Lynch film.... [Roth] is the most courageous writer alive, and this is another brave move.” —The Guardian [UK]

Booklist (starred review)

Roth’s voice, long heard and long appreciated, remains profound.”

FEBRUARY 2010 - AudioFile

Creating distinctive characters is one of the gratifying gifts in the arsenal of a talented narrator. But more important in the case of a work by a literary giant is capturing the author's unique sensibility. That is what makes Dick Hill such a splendid reader of Roth's novels. Roth's heroes are tempestuous, comic creations ceaselessly in arguments with themselves, with others, and with life itself. They are infuriating, fully engaged, and, of course, hyper-articulate. Roth's latest creation, Simon Axler, is a once-eminent actor now in his mid-sixties who is facing dual crises that leave him railing, Lear-like, against the tides of age. As a character, Axler is exasperating and foolish, but in Hill's performance, mesmerizing. M.O. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159313072
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	11/07/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1.
Into Thin Air

He'd lost his magic. The impulse was spent. He'd never failed in the theater, everything he had done had been strong and successful, and then the terrible thing happened: he couldn't act. Going onstage had become agony. Instead of the certainty that he was going to be wonderful, he knew he was going to fail. It happened three times in a row, and by the last time nobody was interested, nobody came. He couldn't get over to the audience. His talent was dead.

Of course, if you've had it, you always have something unlike anyone else's. I'll always be unlike anyone else, Axler told himself, because I am who I am. I carry that with me—that people will always remember. But the aura he'd had, all his mannerisms and eccentricities and personal peculiarities, what had worked for Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya—what had gained Simon Axler his reputation as the last of the best of the classical American stage actors—none of it worked for any role now. All that had worked to make him himself now worked to make him look like a lunatic. He was conscious of every moment he was on the stage in the worst possible way. In the past when he was acting he wasn't thinking about anything. What he did well he did out of instinct. Now he was thinking about everything, and everything spontaneous and vital was killed—he tried to control it with thinking and instead he destroyed it. All right, Axler told himself, he had hit a bad period. Though he was already in his sixties, maybe it would pass while he was still recognizably himself. He wouldn't be the first experienced actor to go through it. A lot of people did. I've done this before, he thought, so I'll find some way. I don't know how I'm going to get it this time, but I'll find it—this will pass.

It didn't pass. He couldn't act. The ways he could once rivet attention on the stage! And now he dreaded every performance, and dreaded it all day long. He spent the entire day thinking thoughts he'd never thought before a performance in his life: I won't make it, I won't be able to do it, I'm playing the wrong roles, I'm overreaching, I'm faking, I have no idea even of how to do the first line. And meanwhile he tried to occupy the hours doing a hundred seemingly necessary things to prepare; I have to look at this speech again, and by the time he got to the theater he was exhausted. And dreading going out there. He would hear the cue coming closer and closer and know that he couldn't do it. He waited for the freedom to begin and the moment to become real, he waited to forget who he was and to become the person doing it, but instead he was standing there, completely empty, doing the kind of acting you do when you don't know what you are doing. He could not give and he could not withhold; he had no fluidity and he had no reserve. Acting became a night-after-night exercise in trying to get away with something.

It had started with people speaking to him. He couldn't have been more than three or four when he was already mesmerized by speaking and being spoken to. He had felt he was in a play from the outset. He could use intensity of listening, concentration, as lesser actors used fireworks. He had that power offstage, too, particularly, when younger, with women who did not realize that they had a story until he revealed to them that they had a story, a voice, and a style belonging to no other. The became actresses with Axler, they became the heroines of their own lives. Few stage actors could speak and be spoke to the way he could, yet he could do neither anymore. The sound that used to go into his ear felt as though it were going out, and every word he uttered seemed acted instead of spoken. The initial source in his acting was in what he heard, his response to what he heard was at the core of it, and if he couldn't listen, couldn't hear, he had nothing to go on.

He was asked to play Prospero and Macbeth at the Kennedy Center—it was hard to think of a more ambitious double bill—and he failed appallingly in both, but especially as Macbeth. He couldn't do low-intensity Shakespeare and he couldn't do high-intensity Shakespeare—and he'd been doing Shakespeare all his life. His Macbeth was ludicrous and everyone who saw it said as much, and so did many who hadn't seen it. "No, the don't even have to have been there," he said, "to insult you." A lot of actors would have turned to drink to help themselves out an old joke had it that there was an actor who would always drink before he went onstage, and when he was warned "You musn't drink," he replied, "What, and go out there alone?" But Axler didn't drink, and so he collapsed instead. His breakdown was colossal.

The worst of it was that he saw through his breakdown the same way he could see through his acting. The suffering was excruciating and yet he doubted that it was genuine, which made it even worse. He did not know how he was going to get from one minute to the next, his mind felt as though it were melting, he was terrified to be alone, he could not sleep more than two or three hours a night, he scarcely ate, he thought every day of killing himself with the gun in the attic—a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun that he kept in the isolate farmhouse for self-defense—and still the whole thing seemed to be an act, a bad act. When you're playing the role of somebody coming apart, it has organization and order; when you're observing yourself coming apart, playing the role of your own demise, that's something else, something awash with terror and fear.

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