Writing for Tablet Magazine, Adam Kirsch finds The Humbling "thinly imagined, with few surprises in plot or language."
The books he has produced since then, as he entered his 70s, can only be called late late Roth—or better still, endgame Roth, since they are a series of meditations on last things. In Everyman and Indignation, Roth’s protagonists are actually dead, looking back on their lives from beyond the grave. In Exit Ghost, his alter ego Nathan Zuckerman is impotent, which for a Rothian hero is a fate worse than death.
Now comes The Humbling, the latest installment in this wan series. The title could have been used for any of those three books, especially Exit Ghost, for Roth is once again dwelling on impotence—in this case, not just sexual but artistic, too. “He’d lost his magic. The impulse was spent,” read the first lines of the book, and they tell us everything we need to know—in fact, just about everything we ever learn—about Simon Axler, Roth’s latest avatar. Just as Saul Bellow used to make his alter egos professors or journalists, but wrote about them as if they were really novelists—that is, as if they were himself—so Roth makes Axler an actor, a calling that can easily be translated back into its writerly original.
We haven't read The Humbling yet, though we plan to, and we're interested to see how it compares to Eclipse, John Banville's story of a stage actor who loses his gift. Would make an interesting Compare and Contrast. (Not too make too much of names but Banville's actor is Alex Cleave, and the proagonist of Shroud, his next book which involves Cleave's daughter, is Axel. And now Roth gives us Axler.)
