The Humbling Book

The second to last novel Roth wrote before he retired, The Humbling, is the second lowest rated (3.21) Roth novel on Goodreads (the lowest being The Breast, 3.18! about a man who wakes up one morning'as in Kafka's "Metamorphosis"'to discover he is a breast). 3.21 is a low rating for Goodreads, and at a glance it appears many people hated it. It's part of a loosely connected series of final books Roth wrote, called Nemeses, that focuses on decline and death (sounds like fun, eh?). So I will admit I had low expectations for this novel.

And so, at least half way into it, I was increasingly annoyed by it. Simon Axler is a famous actor who plays Prospero and Macbeth at the Kennedy Center, fails, gets terrible reviews and falls apart, ending up in a psych hospital, suicidal. Okay, so far so not encouraging. I mean: Failure happens, but how do you handle it? Simon thinks about suicide and the arts:

"What was remarkable was the frequency with which suicide enters into drama, as though it were a formula fundamental to the drama, not necessarily supported by the action as directed by the workings of the genre itself."

Suicide is also a consideration for some characters in the two previous Nemeses books, Everyman and Indignation. So I wasn't surprised to see it here, as it is one choice some people consider making as they face a challenging (or hopeless) future. I'm not sympathetic, the suicide rate is going up, it's an issue, but in the second section of the novel I get less sympathetic, when Axler, 65, meets Pegeen, 40, the lesbian daughter of old friends, and abruptly begins a sexual relationship with her. Ach! I suddenly thought I was watching a Woody Allen movie, Manhattan (or a few others from Allen) about an unhappy older man rescued by an affair with a younger woman. And that he would hope to "turn" this younger woman, buying her more feminine clothes, getting her to get a very different hair cut than she had ever had, ugh.

Then this couple invites yet another woman into the scenario, to create a threes-me, and wow, everything is going great, even though Simon has a bad back and no longer has a career! Hey! Unhappy 65 year olds men! Try this at home! Seduce a young lesbian and your life will improve and your depression will vanish! Disappointing. At one point the desperate Simon imagines that Pegeen might like a child with him, he fantasizes a happy future with her, he creates this elaborate fiction and begins performing it for himself. An act of hope, but finally, not realistic, alas.

But that is, as it turns out, the point we are to discover: Simon's getting involved with this woman was never going to work, it was just a kind of experiment for her, he was her Dad's famous actor friend, wow, and a hopeless fantasy for him. She's a lesbian!

What I liked about this book is that it focuses on performance; the failing performer Simon tried to perform the role of Pegeen's lover and it was a failure. Sad double whammy. No acting career, no rescuing lover. Pegeen tries to perform a straight woman, just as Simon tries to perform a role no longer possible for him. It's sad, but sadder still that he sees no hopeful role for himself anymore. So it's not a happy novel, finally involving two crazy jilted lovers and also, as it turns out, guns: See, Pegeen had prior to hooking up with Simon dumped Louise, the dean of a small college whom she was having an affair with, and Louise, crazy with residual jealousy, confronts Simon, and then Pegeen dumps Simon. The drama! So I know what you are thinking at this point: Eh.

But I really began to like this novel more and more after I reread The Seagull, which makes its appearance in the conclusion of The Humbling. This tragicomic play involves a playwright who goes into despair over the critical reception of a play he has been writing, and his subsequent failure of a relationship with a young woman, Nina. Roth loved Chekhov, abd he loved this play, and it figures in the shaping of The Humbling in many ways. The tone of The Humbling feels like tragic farce, it's so ridiculous in places, but read through The Seagull, you can see how he was inspired by it. The Seagull has (melo)-drama in it, despairing characters, but Chekhov's play is more comic, featuring warmer characters. There's no joking around in The Humbling. Chekhov's play is better, because of the humor, but still, I like the connection.

I like this book, though, finally, it is not one of his towering achievements. I didn't like it as much as Everyman or Indignation. But there's at its core this stoical dimension to it that works it's way into all the final novels, a kind of drive to accept what is given to you and live with it, work with it, something Chekhov would have been pleased to see:

"Play the moment, play whatever plays for you in that moment, and then go to the next moment. It doesn't matter where you're going. Don't worry about that. Just take it moment, moment, moment, moment."