Monday, December 14, 2009

Book Review: Philip Roth The Humbling


To the left:  Author Philip Roth

Maybe it is the fact that I am 66 years old.  Now I am reading books in which aging is a major theme.

This is one reason why I picked up The Humbling  (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009, 140 pp) by America's greatest living novelist, Philip Roth. 

This weekend I read The Humbling in one two hour session.  The story is of Simon Axler, once golden boy of the New York stage, now  66 years old.  The tone of the novel is set by the very first paragraph:  "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 on-stage became 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."

The deep depression that Axler's lost gift causes is the theme of the first part of the book.  He can't shake this depression or the conviction that his best moments are behind him.  His agent, acting almost like a friend of Job, tries to entice him into a major return to the stage with no luck whatsoever. 

The second section of the book, titled "The Transformation" is about illusions, desire and falsely grounded hope.  I won't tell what happens in this disturbing section in order not to give away the plot.  But sex is here and in surprisingly large amounts for a guy who thought he was done with even desire. 

The third section of the book, "The Last Act" describes how Axler decides that he can have one measure--one last measure--of control in his life.  And how he can, as it were, return to the stage.  But this return is dark and troubling.

The Humbling reminds me that the American idea of a youthful aging process is a great myth.  Aging is what it is:  physical breakdown, mental uncertainties, loneliness, remaining desire, deterioration, memory of the past, of better days.  True, some people because of their genes and chromosones and because of their disposition or material wealth handle aging better than others.  Still,Roth's book stands as a potent reminder that aging ain't for sissies.

The truth of this fiction by Roth is hard and very cold.  No matter how much we are told that you are only as old as you feel or are inside, no matter how older persons are marketed as at a wonderfully sunny place, the reality is more on the side of Simon Axler. 

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