Journey into Night

Suicide is the role you write for yourself.… You inhabit it and you enact it. All carefully staged — where they will find you and how they will find you…. But one performance only.” So says Simon Axler,the protagonist of Philip Roth’s latest novel (a novella actually),“the last of the best of the classical American stage actors”,a mid-60s genius who has played them all (Falstaff,Macbeth,Peer Gynt,Vanya) and has now “lost his magic”. He is talking to his fellow patients at a psychiatric hospital where he checks himself in after his dramatic fall at the Kennedy Center,where he fails as Prospero and Macbeth,triggering a depression that finally drives away his wife — a tragic failure herself,with a drug-addicted son from a previous marriage — and makes him sit with the barrel of a gun in his mouth.

After Everyman and Exit Ghost,The Humbling extends Roth’s prolonged meditation on decay,destruction and death — of becoming insubstantial and vanishing “into thin air”. The revels are ended because Axler — whose every performance had been “strong and successful” — learns that “his talent was dead”. No amount of prodding from his agent to take lessons in recovery — relearning his craft,so to say — and a role as James Tyrone in a production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night can make Axler return: “Tyrone is a lot of lines that you have to say,and I can’t say them. James Tyrone is a character that you have to be,and I can’t be him. There’s no way I can play James Tyrone. I can’t play anyone.”

After his fall,Axler was obsessed with Prospero’s most famous lines and Part I of the book is titled “Into Thin Air”. He leaves the hospital after 26 days,and the reader might suspect he’ll now painfully readjust to changed realities,attaining a kind of equilibrium,deprived though of his selfhood that existed in the characters he could become. But then enters Pegeen,former lesbian,daughter of old friends,25 years his junior,who sexually recharges him in “The Transformation” (Part II),ignites an illusion of life and recovery which can only be the road to destruction. If Roth’s women have always been variations on the archetypal emasculating bitch (when they are not smashed half-creatures),Pegeen is a caricature of the homosexual who wants it both ways. In any case,what was to be the resuscitation turns out to be the kiss of death. “The Last Act” (Part III) is the end Axler feared all along. If she leaves strong,and he weak,it’ll be an unbearable blow. And it is.

The Humbling is very un-Roth,perhaps why it’s being dismissed summarily round the world. It doesn’t have the expanse of Roth. It is not quite on the Roth scale,and gives the impression of looser composition. But whatever does stand out puts the book’s uncharacteristic qualities in perspective — Roth structures the narrative and reduces the pointedness of the narratorial voice to reflect Axler’s gradual and increasing unreality. Axler and his story melt into air,into thin air.