With “The Humbling’’ the shipyard has done a distracted and hasty job. From the launch, it is clearly destined to go down. The trouble is that the trip is rough, the furnishings uncharacteristically shoddy, and the food lumpy.
In his last few books Roth has been treating last things: failing powers in “Exit Ghost,’’ a young man’s self-destructive path to death in “Indignation.’’ The first is haunting, the second wonderfully outrageous. As the French use butter to quietly enrich all manner of dishes, Roth uses comedy to enhance his somberness, and it is true of both of these brief but splendid books.
Not of this one. Failing powers are the single and unvarying theme in “The Humbling.” A great actor is suddenly unable to act; the misery and the humiliations to which this leads bring him to the verge of suicide. It is not the business of a review to be telling what happens. It is telling, though, that the reader rather wants him to go ahead with it.
Simon Axler is in the line of other Rothian figures of obnoxious extremity. With them, though, it is an extremity in which many of us may recognize as our own incipiences. So various are they, so bristling with ingenious self-invention, and, above all, so funny in their indignations, as to approach a prickly kind of charm.
Axler is charmless, an old man of sodden anger and self-pity. Roth has given him no sardonic side trips, no ingenious speculations, no humor. He squats upon his unhappiness like a large bullfrog upon a small lily pad. Not a bit of lily to be seen.
Briefly the story. Axler gives two dreadful and derided performances in Washington D.C. Suddenly, he feels, he has lost his acting magic. His wife leaves him. He has a stay in a psychiatric hospital. He emerges to live a depressed and solitary life in the country, resisting his agent’s plea to return to the stage.
The lesbian daughter of an old friend visits, cares for him, administers bouts of increasingly kinky sex, then suddenly leaves. His brief hopes extinguished - perhaps he could act again - he cradles a gun and wonders whether he has the guts to kill himself.
