Fiction review: The Humbling

FICTION
Philip Roth's novels have become downright austere in recent years, with none of the past four cracking 300 pages. They're chamber works, small-scale explorations of an idea or two. For Roth, that normally means sex and death. These days, he's whittling it down to death alone.

That's not to say that his new novel, "The Humbling," is sex-free. But the balance of power has definitely shifted to the Grim Reaper.

As the novel opens, Simon Axler -- "the last of the best of the classical American stage actors" -- has stumbled professionally.

"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," Roth writes.

Soon Axler's crisis grows. Unable to cope with his collapse, his wife leaves him, and by Page 9 his thoughts turn to suicide. But rather than taking the Hemingway route, he calls his doctor and has himself admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

Axler emerges 26 days later incompletely cured and still wary of appearing onstage. He turns down a prestigious acting gig (playing James Tyrone in a Guthrie Theater production of "Long Day's Journey into Night"), telling his agent, "Something fundamental has vanished. Maybe it had to. Things go."

Then the 65-year-old Axler stumbles into an unlikely affair with a woman 25 years younger, and he finds happiness again. (That's right: Now we get to the sex.)

The affair isn't carefree, though. Pegeen Stapleford's parents -- stage actors who have known Axler for decades -- have misgivings about their daughter dating a man whose health is bound to decline soon.

And Pegeen's lesbian ex-lover refuses to go away.

"She's turned me into a beggar," the ex-lover tells Axler, when he discovers her peeking into the windows of his farmhouse in upstate New York. "Who knows what she's turning you into. She leaves a trail of disaster."

The possibility that the ex-lover's warnings about Pegeen are right -- "[S]he's utterly ruthless, utterly cold-hearted, incomparably selfish, and completely amoral" -- infuses more tension into the novel than Roth's flirting with the Grim Reaper does, even if he doesn't offer a definitive answer about her character until the final pages.

Brace yourself for those final pages, by the way. References to Anton Chekhov appear throughout "The Humbling," nudging us toward tragedy. (Given Chekhov's rule that a gun that appears early in a story must be fired before it ends, the appearance of Axler's shotgun in the opening pages doesn't bode well.)

But Roth's small cast and the intensely focused crisis also bring to mind Ingmar Bergman's films, as well as the stage plays of Bergman's patron saint of misogyny, August Strindberg. Of course, Bergman and Strindberg aren't known for their laughs, and "The Humbling" won't provoke many belly laughs either.

What's next for Roth? A one-page account of his chess match with the black-hooded figure of Death himself?

Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at http://www.thewag.net.