 Cover of the first edition. | |
| Author | Philip Roth |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel, Theatre-fiction |
| Published | 2009 |
| Publisher | Houghton Mifflin Harcourt |
| Pages | 140 |
| ISBN | 978-0-547-23969-9 |
| OCLC | 317917962 |
| Preceded by | Indignation |
| Followed by | Nemesis |
The Humbling is a novel by Philip Roth published in the fall of 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. [1] It is Roth's 30th book and concerns "an aging stage actor whose empty life is altered by a 'counterplot of unusual erotic desire'." [1]
Simon Axler is a famed sexagenarian stage actor who suddenly and inexplicably loses his gift. His weak attempts at portraying Prospero and Macbeth on stage at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., lead to poor reviews, sending Axler into a profound depression and causing him to give up acting and contemplate suicide with a shotgun he keeps in his attic. His wife, Victoria, a former ballerina, is unable to deal with Axler's depression and moves to California, where their son lives. Axler checks himself into a psychiatric hospital on the advice of his physician and stays there for 26 days.
In the hospital, Axler meets another patient, Sybil Van Buren, who tells him about catching her second husband sexually abusing her young daughter. She expresses shame at not immediately reporting her husband or removing him from the home and admits to attempting suicide. Sybil asks Axler whether he would be willing to kill her husband and he tells her he fears he would "botch the job".
Months after his stint in the hospital, Axler's agent, Jerry Oppenheim, visits him at his upstate New York home to tell him about an offer to play James Tyrone in Long Day's Journey into Night . Axler refuses, fearing another failure. In the fan mail Oppenheim brings, Axler finds a letter from Sybil, thanking him for listening to her problems in the hospital. She says she did not recognize him at the time but decided to write him after catching one of his old movies on TV.
Pegeen Mike Stapleford, the 40-year-old daughter of two actors he performed with around the time she was born, pays Axler a visit at his house. Pegeen has just moved nearby to work as a professor at a Vermont women's college after ending a six-year relationship with a woman who decided to undergo sex reassignment surgery to become a man. Pegeen's job was secured after she slept with the school's "smitten" dean, Louise Renner.
Simon and Pegeen begin an affair despite Pegeen's having lived as a lesbian for the previous 17 years. Louise is furious that Pegeen has broken off their relationship and begins stalking her. Months later, Louise calls Pegeen's parents in Lansing, Michigan, to tell them that their daughter is now sleeping with Axler. Pegeen is distressed that her parents have learned about the relationship she wanted kept secret. Her father, Asa, tells her he disapproves because of the age difference but Simon suspects he merely envies his professional success. Asa directs community theater in Michigan.
Axler reads in the local newspaper that Sybil has shot and killed her estranged husband. He contacts Sybil's sister and offers to help with her murder defense.
One night, Pegeen "offers" Axler a 19-year-old college student of her acquaintance named Lara. Lara becomes a fantasy of his and a character in Pegeen's sexual role-playing.
Soon after, while Axler and Pegeen are dining out, he notices Tracy, a young woman getting drunk at the restaurant bar, and they take her home for a threesome. Afterward, Axler asks her why she agreed to go home with them, and she admits she recognized him as a famous actor. After this adventure, Axler feels rejuvenated and decides he wants to perform in Long Day's Journey after all. He also decides that he wants to father a child with Pegeen and visits a fertility specialist without telling her.
Two weeks later, Pegeen ends their relationship, telling Axler she "made a mistake." He accuses her of leaving him to be with Tracy and believes Pegeen's parents have turned her against him. He calls her parents, shouting at them in an angry tirade. After the call, Axler kills himself with his shotgun.
The reviews for The Humbling largely suggested that, after several books that had received high critical acclaim, Roth had taken a misstep, to be blamed in part on his extremely prolific output in recent years.
In a highly critical piece for The Guardian and The Observer, William Skidelsky resoundingly panned the novel and called for Roth to slow down, declaring:
Roth's new novel is, by his standards, dismayingly poor...it can hardly be called a novel at all; it is more an old man's sexual fantasy dressed up in the garb of literature. There are, of course, redeeming features: an interesting initial conceit, the usual beautifully controlled writing. And the novel asks interesting questions about ageing and what it does to you. But these things aren't nearly enough to make up for the absurdity at its core. [2]
Skidelsky concluded by remarking, "On reading such a piece of scandalous frippery, it is hard not to conclude that Roth, rather than forging furiously ahead, should indeed be slowing down a little. And perhaps he should be getting out of the house a bit more." [2]
In Literary Review , Sam Leith wrote: "The Humbling is just as its title suggests. Not the tragedy its protagonist might have hoped for – rather, a work of plaintive comedy." [3]
Further negative notices came from Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, which criticized the novel as "an overstuffed short story... a slight, disposable work". Kakutani added that Roth seemed to be "...simply going through the motions of ticking off plot points on a spindly, ill-conceived outline." [4]
Mixed but slightly more positive notices were also forthcoming. The Daily Telegraph, which despite also declaring the novel to be "slight", went on to praise The Humbling as a "grave—and important—novel... a fine, unsettling piece of writing that deserves its place in Roth’s canon... His new work will not detain you long, but it will linger." [5] 2008 Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga in his review for The Times declared the novel to be "...the most entertaining depressing book you’ll read this year", comparing it to Roth's own highly praised Sabbath's Theater and The Human Stain , but went on to add caveats. Adiga, despite calling the novel "an original and unsettling book", also considered the novel "a failure", adding, "the language is vibrant, the sex is smutty, there are some lovely surprises in the narrative — yet, like Everyman , it lacks the wider social engagement that made American Pastoral or I Married a Communist so memorable. Like Everyman, it is a voluptuous essay on extinction masquerading as a novel." [6]
One of the most positive reviews of the novel came from Jesse Kornbluth who declared it "Roth's best work in years; sentence for sentence, paragraph for paragraph, he's still the most readable serious writer we've got." Kornbluth went on to praise numerous aspects of the novel summing up with what amounted to an open tribute to Roth and his writing: "This is a long way from the summer romance of Goodbye, Columbus. But Philip Roth was 26 when he published that. He's 76 now. He's outlived all of his rivals. He's our most prominent novelist. And over 30 books, he's learned how to disturb us — and keep us reading. The Humbling is haunting proof." [7]
In December 2009, actor Al Pacino purchased the rights to the novel for the purposes of creating a film adaptation. The film, directed by Barry Levinson, was released in the USA on January 23, 2015.
The Human Stain is a novel by Philip Roth, published May 5, 2000. The book is set in Western Massachusetts in the late 1990s. It is narrated by 65-year-old author Nathan Zuckerman, who appears in several earlier Roth novels, and who also figures in both American Pastoral (1997) and I Married a Communist (1998), two books that form a loose trilogy with The Human Stain. Zuckerman acts largely as an observer as the complex story of the protagonist, Coleman Silk, a retired professor of classics, is slowly revealed.
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.
The Vampire Lestat (1985) is a vampire novel by American writer Anne Rice, the second in her Vampire Chronicles, following Interview with the Vampire (1976). The story is told from the point of view of the vampire Lestat de Lioncourt as narrator, while Interview is narrated by Louis de Pointe du Lac. Several events in the two books appear to contradict each other, allowing the reader to decide which version of events they believe to be accurate.
The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. The novel follows the fortunes of the Roth family during the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more acceptable in American life and Jewish-American families like the Roths are persecuted on various levels. The narrator and central character in the novel is the young Philip, and the care with which his confusion and terror are rendered makes the novel as much about the mysteries of growing up as about American politics. Roth based his novel on the isolationist ideas espoused by Lindbergh in real life as a spokesman for the America First Committee, and on his own experiences growing up in Newark, New Jersey. The novel received praise for the realism of its world and its treatment of topics such as antisemitism, trauma, and the perception of history. The novel depicts the Weequahic section of Newark which includes Weequahic High School from which Roth graduated. A miniseries adaptation of the novel aired on HBO in March 2020.
Sabbath's Theater is a novel by Philip Roth about the exploits of 64-year-old Mickey Sabbath. It won the 1995 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. The cover is a detail of Sailor and Girl (1925) by German painter Otto Dix.
The Ghost Writer is a 1979 novel by the American author Philip Roth. It is the first of Roth's novels narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, one of the author's putative fictional alter egos, and constitutes the first book in his Zuckerman Bound trilogy. The novel touches on themes common to many Roth works, including identity, the responsibilities of authors to their subjects, and the condition of Jews in America. Parts of the novel are a reprise of The Diary of Anne Frank.
Arthur Phillips is an American novelist. His books include Prague (2002), The Egyptologist (2004), Angelica (2007), The Song Is You (2009), The Tragedy of Arthur (2011), and The King at the Edge of the World (2020).
Amsterdam is a 1998 novel by British writer Ian McEwan, for which he was awarded the 1998 Booker Prize.
Breathing Lessons is a Pulitzer Prize–winning 1988 novel by American author Anne Tyler. It is her eleventh novel and won the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
When We Were Orphans is the fifth novel by Nobel Prize-winning British author Kazuo Ishiguro, published in 2000. It is loosely categorised as a detective novel. When We Were Orphans was shortlisted for the 2000 Booker Prize.
The Broom of the System is the first novel by the American writer David Foster Wallace, published in 1987.
In the Beauty of the Lilies is a 1996 novel by John Updike. It takes its title from a line of the abolitionist song "The Battle Hymn of the Republic." The novel received the 1997 Ambassador Book Award for Fiction.
The Innocent is a 1990 novel by British writer Ian McEwan. It received positive reviews from book critics and is often considered one of his best novels.
Exit Ghost is a 2007 novel by Philip Roth. It is the ninth, and last, novel featuring Nathan Zuckerman.
Aravind Adiga is an Indian writer and journalist. His debut novel, The White Tiger, won the 2008 Man Booker Prize.
The White Tiger is a novel by Indian author Aravind Adiga. It was published in 2008 and won the 40th Booker Prize the same year. The novel provides a darkly humorous perspective of India's class struggle in a globalized world as told through a retrospective narration from Balram Halwai, a village boy. The novel examines issues of the Hindu religion, caste, loyalty, corruption and poverty in India.
Nemesis is a novel by Philip Roth published on October 5, 2010, by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It is Roth's 31st book, "a work of fiction set in the summer of 1944 that tells of a polio epidemic and its effects on a closely knit Newark community and its children." In 2012, Philip Roth told an interviewer that Nemesis would be his last novel.
A Gate at the Stairs is a novel by American fiction writer Lorrie Moore. It was published by Random House in 2009. The novel won Amazon.com's "best of the month" designation and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction.
The Humbling is a 2014 comedy-drama film directed by Barry Levinson and written by Buck Henry and Michal Zebede, based on the 2009 novel The Humbling by Philip Roth. The film stars Al Pacino, Greta Gerwig, Dianne Wiest, Nina Arianda, Dylan Baker, Charles Grodin, Dan Hedaya, Billy Porter, Kyra Sedgwick, and Mary Louise Wilson.
Eat the Document is a 2006 novel by American writer Dana Spiotta about New Left activists in the 1970s and their successors a generation later in the 1990s. Its title refers to a 1972 documentary about Bob Dylan. It was a National Book Award finalist and won the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
