Sample Book Reviews
The Actor, Humbled
Yevgeniya Traps
The Humbling
Philip Roth
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
http://www.hougthtonmifflinbooks.com
160 pages; cloth, $26.00
A terrible thing has happened to Simon Axler, the protagonist of Philip Roth’s The Humbling: “He’d lost his magic…. His talent was dead.” Axler, once a prominent, successful stage actor—“There was no one more thorough and studious and serious, no one who took better care of his talent or who better accommodated himself to the changing conditions of a career in the theater over so many decades”—suddenly, inexplicably finds himself unable to act, incapable of performing in any meaningful way.
“The Humbling is a relentless work, bleak and merciless.”
Roth’s thirtieth book, The Humbling is a relentless work, bleak and merciless. In this slim tome—a novella, really—we are made witness to an inexorable stripping of self, an unstoppable, inescapable unmaking of a man, the unraveling of his professional life, his sexual self, who and what and why he is. No explanation is given. No explanation can be given. Simon Axler, anyhow, does not particularly look for causes. “Nothing has a good reason for happening,” Axler tells the doctor treating him at an institution to which he has had himself admitted in an early attempt to ward off his unraveling. “You lose, you gain—it’s all caprice. The omnipotence of chance. The likelihood of reversal. Yes, the unpredictable reversal and its power.” Axler knows unpredictable reversal, that trick of myth, that payoff of tragedy, knows about chance and fate and hubris, for he has devoted his life, his gifts, his formidable talents to bringing such things of fiction to real, dramatic life. He has been Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya, embodied these men seemingly without effort, rendering them flesh and bone and blood. To have brought these men to life has, in turn, given Simon Axler meaning. One of the book’s animating questions then is who Axler might be if not an actor, if not the man who can animate Prospero and Macbeth, as he finds himself unable to do as the book opens.
There are, of course, any number of ways in which a man’s life might fall apart, and Roth has spent some fifty years chronicling these and exploring their peculiarities. The myriad means we have for betraying ourselves and others have been the particular concern of much of his work. Relationships, for Roth, are fraught with treachery—in word, in thought, in deed. History too is a threat, consistent only in making the individual a mere plaything. But if cruelty—the cruelty of the world and the people in it, the cruelty of good and bad intentions, cruelty both casual and deliberate—has been one of Roth’s constant motifs, The Humbling comes as surprise in its insistence that nothing but cruelty is finally possible. Nothing has a good reason for happening becomes a way of saying that nothing good happens. Compact and terse, The Humbling is also brutal, focusing entirely on loss, the stripping away of layers of meaningful selfhood without examining the consolation these layers may have once held, constructing new layers only to strip these away as well.
Simon Axler has no meaning for us beyond his suffering, no meaning beyond his awful fate. Caught up in “the ancient themes of dramatic literature: incest, betrayal, injustice, cruelty, vengeance, jealousy, rivalry, desire, loss, dishonor, and grief,” Axler has also lost the certainty literature provides by way of explanations. The nature of his tragedy is that it is difficult to understand it as tragedy, impossible—at first—to see what has brought on his downfall. “It was all a fluke,” he tells his former agent, “a fluke that a talent was given to me, a fluke that it was taken away. This life’s a fluke from start to finish.” Everything evaporates, melts away “into thin air,” as Prospero’s famous words have it.
“Into Thin Air” is the title of the book’s first part, which documents the disappearance of Axler’s talent, his subsequent breakdown, and his recovery, his return to the new normal of his life. The remainder of the book, its second and third parts—or perhaps more accurately, its second and third acts—are respectively called “The Transformation” and “The Last Act.” These chronicle the entrance of Pegeen Mike Stapleford, the formerly lesbian daughter of his old costars in The Playboy of the Western World (1907), into Axler’s life. Their relationship—at first tentative, loving, then increasingly vicious, a relationship in many ways typical of Roth’s oeuvre—propels the rest of the plot—and the rest of Axler’s life—to its unavoidable conclusion, a conclusion that, at the end, emerges as long foretold. It is, for Axler, a relationship of last resort, a doomed attempt at rewriting a story whose epilogue has already been written, and this sometimes makes the liaison seem more plot device than a convincing meeting of two people, a true and felt realization of romantic and sexual interaction. Pegeen herself is more often than not a type rather than a plausible woman, a character whose motivations are left unexplored, whose contradictions are significant only as means to the end. Though her representation sometimes approximates misogynist caricature, she is finally necessary for effecting Axler’s final humbling as well as for emphasizing how far he has already fallen, for if “his response to what he heard” had been at the center of his acting, then his failure to respond properly here is synonymous with the failure that initiates the book.
“I have concerned myself with men and women,’’ Roth remarked in a 1972 interview with Alan Lelchuk, particularly with those men and women “whose moorings have been cut, and who are swept away from their native shores and out to sea.” If in much of his earlier work Roth has attempted to document the moorings and the tragic flaws that destroy them, The Humbling is interested mainly in depicting the drowning, the helpless, hopeless attempt to stay afloat. It is difficult to look on, to watch a man beaten about by forces he can neither control nor comprehend. It is harder still to care, to feel deeply for a man whose life story we do not know, whose greatness we do not see. Perhaps the real interest lies elsewhere—in the parallels between acting and writing, in the fear of growing old and incapable, foolishly drawn to heights one can no longer scale. Roth’s books have gotten shorter, smaller in scope, humbler. Good acting lies in “mak[ing] the imagined real,” Axler explains; so too does good writing. The Humbling makes real—too real—the fear, the universal nightmare, of having—suddenly and unreasonably—nothing to say, the power to make the imagined real lost forever.
Yevgeniya Traps is a PhD student in English at the Graduate Center-CUNY. She is also an adjunct instructor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, Barnard College, and Queens College.
