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The Humbling - Philip Roth

Narrator: Dick Hill | Mp3/VBR~95 kbps | Listening Length: 3 hour(s) and 34 min. | 7% Recovery

& 8220;Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of Philip Roth’s startling new 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.

Following the dark meditations on mortality and endings in Everyman and Exit Ghost, and the bitterly ironic retrospect on youth and chance in Indignation, Roth has written another in his haunting group of late novels.

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.)

What happens when a man loses the one thing that defines him as a human being? With nods to Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Shaw, Roth's grim new novel explores this question—with varying success. While the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post praised Roth's elegant writing and caustic wit, other reviewers found the novel superficial and oddly lifeless, citing flat characters, undeveloped plot contrivances, a lack of humor, and a hostile portrayal of homosexuality. Even the graphic sex is "coarse" and "dull," according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Though not his best work, The Humbling may appeal to faithful Roth fans; others should pick up one of his earlier novels.

*Starred Review* The great Roth has always written both short novels and long novels, choosing a length perfectly suited to what he has to say. Thus, his thirtieth book is brief and perfectly so. Soon into its pages, the reader will recall the title of a famous play about Henry II of England, The Lion in Winter. The lion here, increasingly toothless, is sixtysomething Simon Axler, a famous stage and screen actor. Yes, he’s famous, but now he is so stultified by uncertainty about his talent and how to execute his craft that he can no long perform. His wife flees, and Simon retires to his upstate New York farm, even checking himself into a psychiatric ward for a short stay. Roth does not labor over the man’s distress. Using spare prose, he makes the situation only as poignant as it deserves to be. When Simon takes up with a woman young enough to be his daughter, who is the daughter of old acting friends, Roth again uses concise language to best convey the sadness of what is only a short rehabilitation for Simon, and which ultimately forces his hand in determining how his life will proceed—or not. Roth’s voice, long heard and long appreciated, remains profound.

“Elegant and brutal. . . . Direct and urgent, a taut and controlled fever-dream that demands to be experienced at a single sitting. . . . is a master.” —The Los Angeles Times

“Convincing and powerful. . . . At 76, 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 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

“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

“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. . . . is the most courageous writer alive, and this is another brave move.” —The Guardian

In 1997, Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for AMERICAN PASTORAL. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction, previously awarded to John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, and Saul Bellow, among others. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA received the Society of American Historians’ prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004.” Recently Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious prizes: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. Roth is the only living American writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. & 8221;



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Rating:
2.5 out of 5 by Book123