Aging and the end of a career in Philip Roth’s “The Humbling”
Simon Axler cannot act, and so his life collapses. This is the premise of Philip Roth’s thirtieth book, “The Humbling,” an examination of what happens to a successful, aging artist when he can no longer perform his craft.
Much of Roth’s work is autobiographical and Axler is no exception: while Roth can still write, Axler’s descent toward death may mirror Roth’s fears as Roth is an aging author who, after writing for decades about the American Jewish world, has turned inward to look at himself.
Axler’s predicament, however, offers little redemption, as his wife leaves him, he checks into a mental hospital with disappointing results and enters into a relationship that also implodes.
Axler’s abiding problem is that he has lost confidence in his acting talent. Even as his agent makes repeated attempts to relaunch his career, Axler refuses, claiming that he cannot go on stage again despite his stellar career. Instead, Axler spends his time moping at home and contemplating suicide, a state that changes only when he meets his girlfriend, who takes up his time and occupies his thoughts day and night for the duration of their relationship.
Roth never gives the reader substantial hope that Axler’s career will rise out of the ashes or that his personal life will improve for the long term. There is little prospect, from the beginning, for any kind of happy ending.
The only comforting part of the book is the assurance that Axler is not Roth. Many of Roth’s books, in his five decades of work, have been autobiographical, from his nine novels featuring alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman to those in which he shares a name with his protagonist. And though Axler shares many similarities with Roth (he lives a reclusive life in New England, he is elderly, and he has had a long, successful artistic career), it is clear that Roth still has confidence in his writing.
“The Humbling” comes as the latest in a series of four books dealing with death and the end of a career. Its main character also may bear the closest resemblance to Roth of any in the four books. In “Everyman,” his first book of this phase, Roth narrates the death of a man who, like him, has been through divorces and sickness, and who began to create art only while living at a retirement home. “Exit Ghost” and “Indignation,” the next two, focus on men who have already died.
All four, however, reflect Roth’s concerns with aging (he is 76), death and the legacy he will leave behind. In Axler, Roth creates a character who perhaps represents the realization of all of Roth’s fears as he grows old: that he will be socially isolated and, even worse, unable to perform his craft.
So Roth has formed another alter-ego, and this time he is one whom the reader can like: not the frustrated, angry young men of his early books nor the misanthropic, jaded Zuckerman of many of his intermediate novels, but a tired old man struggling to regain the life and work that he loved and lost.
Roth’s style in “The Humbling” also reflects that fatigue. Gone are sentences that were half a page long. Roth no longer deals with people who represented the greatness and inherent contradictions in the golden age of America. Instead, his prose seems matter-of-fact and simple. There is also no humor in “The Humbling,” nor is there much engagement with wider society. We could, of course, glean messages from the book about the place of art in the world, but those do not seem to be Roth’s concern; he’s more interested in the fading of his main character’s life.
That fading is compelling, though, and the story does not drag much even though it is about someone who feels powerless to do anything.
If there is any fading in Roth’s career, it has yet to show. He has produced four novels in the past four years and will keep writing. And his books will not be what they once were. It seems that he is through with attempts at the Great American Novel such as “American Pastoral” or “The Plot Against America,” works that tried to recapture some past ideal, while simultaneously speaking uncomfortable truths about those supposed idyllic times.
But though Roth’s latest books may be narrower in their scope, they are no less insightful. Perhaps he has stopped thinking about the state of the country and has begun thinking about himself; perhaps he has shifted focus from the idealized past to the uncertain future. Or perhaps “The Humbling” is the latest manifestation of a fear of death after such a prolific career, a humble narrative from an author who has witnessed and written about half a century of history.
