From Product Description:

Title from container.

Narrated by Dick Hill.

In container (17 cm.)

Compact disc.

Aging stage actor Simon has lost confidence in his acting ability. Struggling to come to terms with his fears, he spirals downward into a dark world of erotic desire.

Like one other reader here, this was my first foray into Philip Roth. I had read somewhere that like Thomas Pynchon (one of my new favorite authors), he was considered one of the four most important living American writers. I work at a Library, and was shelving The Humbling, which looked short and had a neat cover, and the dust jacket intro seemed promising. I felt I could squeeze ~150 pages into my already overstocked reading list. <br /> <br />I finished reading it yesterday after reading half of it last weekend and being too thoroughly depressed by it to continue. When I was done, I told my wife that I had just read the worst book in my entire life. <br /> <br />Look, maybe I'm not "getting" it. Maybe Roth was meant for someone smarter than me. But I'm not going to take the time needed to read between the lines of this one. If there's anything below the surface of Axler's morbid self-pity and self-centeredness, tell me. The entire novel was one long whine after another. <br /> <br />I doubt I'll ever read Roth again.

I was disappointed in the quality of writing after some memorable books by Roth. The constant, self-centered whining about aging is tiring.

The Humbling, by Philip Roth (148 pgs., 2009). This is Roth's 30th published book. This is one author who never rests on his laurels. <br />He could easily do that. In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature. In 1998, he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House. In 2002, he received the highest award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Gold Medal in Fiction. He has twice won the National Book Award & the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has three times won the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also won the PEN/Nabakov & the PEN/Bellow, American PEN's two highest awards. In 2005, he received the Society of American Historians` Award for historical fiction. He's the only living American author to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. A 9th volume is being planned for 2013. Yet, he keeps on producing first-rate novels which touch deeply on the human condition. <br /> This short novel or long novella is one of his more straightforward plots. An aging 65-year old famous stage actor has lost his ability to act. He ends up committing himself for one month to a mental health facility. His wife has left him. He is estranged from his family. He retreats to a home in upstate NY. Into his life comes the 40-year old lesbian daughter of his two childhood friends. They all used to act together & these two married each other. Their daughter seduces this aging actor who knew her as a child. He knows it may be his last chance at redemption but knows that when she will leave he will be devastated. She says she will not leave him. She says their age difference does not matter. She says she is over her lesbianism. She says her parents negative reaction to their relationship does not matter. He begins to think of having a child with her. He begins to dream of a future of growing older with her. Will what he knew would happen, happen? Will she leave him? Will he be utterly devastated and feel his life is over? <br /> There it is. A simple plot. A very moving story. Two well drawn characters. A young woman of 40 who still has the stubbornness or selfishness of a teenager. <br />Yet, she is a professor at a local woman's college. The two main characters are an aging male & a female Peter Pan who seems never to mature. <br /> Roth himself is way over 65 & he has not lost his writing talent, so this is not autobiographical.

Philip Roth's "The Humbling" lacks all of the pizazz of a good work of literature. Mr. Roth is concerned with the end of the novel due to the decline of readers but will keep on writing, even with this foreseen predicament. This novel seems like a novel written purely to haven been written like a notch in the bedpost, a marker of the towel being thrown in without actually giving up; therefore, we are cheated of a last good hoorah. Mr. Roth should have given up when writing this. Simon, the aging actor, loses his ability to act (which seems odd since this may change but is never lost. It appears as if the novel is attempting to make acting, much like writing for the author, as some unseen force blessed upon the actor from an omnipotent being, that others aren't so lucky to have found, and can easily be taken away). Simon has a break down, goes to an institution, loses his wife, finds some stability in talking to a woman who has witnessed her daughter being sexually abused and is so distraught she checks into the institution instead of being responsible by stopping it in the first place (eventually killing her husband and further ruining her daughters life), leaves the institution and exiles himself to his home in the country, and then as sudden as the days change starts an affair with a lesbian named Pegeen, a daughter of old friends. As tediously long and grating as the previous sentence is, the novel is no better, even with a slim 140 pages. <br /> <br />Simon buys Pegeen a new wardrobe, as if trying to make her more feminine or the kind of woman he wants to be with. Her parents are concerned of the age difference and of the abrupt uncertain change of sexual orientation, due to Pegeen's former lover of many years having sex reassignment to become a man without consulting Pegeen. Pegeen, in her own sort of breakdown, begins the abrupt affair with Simon. Simon fantasizes that Pegeen wants to be with him always and have children with him. He consults a doctor in regards to men his age having children, but he soon finds out that Pegeen wants nothing more to do with him. She reveals that she has been having affairs with other women. She leaves him, and Simon blames her father for getting to her but has no real significant confrontation with him over the phone. Simon kills himself as a reaction to this heartbreak he knew would come in the beginning of the relationship and knew would ruin him. The suicide (hinted as a choice throughout the novel) is firmly predictable and far from any humbling. The suicide is ego-driven when he makes it his last great acting contribution. <br /> <br />There are side occurrences with Pegeen's Dean and Tracy and etc. But they aren't worth mentioning...I like Philip Roth's other works, but this just seemed like a book published to have a book published, without any serious contribution. It seems to be a work of fear, fear of the end of the novel, a fear so deep in Mr. Roth that he is subconsciously willing to bring it about himself, so strong this fear that he is willing to use another form, such as the novella, to bring about its demise. <br /> <br />DLP

The great stage and movie actor Simon Axler is humbled in his mid-sixties when he discovers that he has lost his ability to act. His agonizing leads to his wife leaving him and he enters himself in a twenty some day program in a psychiatric clinic. He meets a young woman there who found her second husband having sex with her infant child from her first husband. The woman wants Axler to kill her husband. After leaving the clinic, he meets a lesbian who lost her lover who decided to go through a sex change operation, remove her breasts and grow a mustache. She gives up her sexual inclinations to have an affair with him, but her parents attempt to break up the relationship because Axler is twenty five years older than her. The two meet a drunken young girl and have a tryst with her. Will these affairs lead to a revival of Axler's ability to act? Will the lesbian be able to remain in a heterosexual relationship? Will her parents succeed in dissuading her from the relationship with Axler? Will the woman from the clinic succeed in having her husband killed? Roth presents this tale in his brilliant, exciting, and beautifully written fashion.