More on 'The Humbling'

The "New Statesman" has weighed in on The Humbling, Philip Roth's latest book, and it's pretty much all thumbs down.


Writes Jason Cowley, editor of the UK-based magazine:

"The Humbling shares most of the preoccupations of Roth's recent fiction: the sorrows and loneliness of old age, illness, the poignancy of lingering sexual desire, and so on. It clearly wants to be read as a companion piece to his impressive late works about the inescapable senselessness of death. Yet it is at times so ridiculous, so stylistically careless and shabbily executed, the characters so thin and artificial, that you think, at first, the whole thing must be an elaborate joke or parody, or else an exercise in character assassination - a novel written by one of Philip Roth's avenging doubles, hypothetical selves or alter egos, whose sole mission is to besmirch the reputation of the celebrated American author we know as "Philip Roth"."

More on Roth's The Humbling

In a review on CounterPunch this weekend, Professor Charles R. Larson, at American University in Washington, D.C., points out what's missing from Roth's latest novel, The Humbling.

It's "the menacing social and political contexts. There are absorbing characters and erotic regeneration, but Roth’s greatest novels typically depict Americans brought down by the forces of the country’s hypocrisy. This time, Roth keeps everything in plain sight, reducing much of the fear of the unknown, leaving little for the reader to ponder."

How true. I should have thought of that.

I have noticed Roth submitting himself to being interviewed by Tina Brown on The Daily Beast and his publisher taking out a full-page ad in The Times for this book, which together make me wonder if the book is not doing so well.

Philip Roth x 2

Two small items featuring one of my very favorite authors:

Last June, the NYTimes wrote about someone having sampled Roth's voice to create a piece of hip-hop music. It's kinda silly, but fun to hear the man's voice and catch a glimpse of his sense of humor. I gather he is good at voices.

More recently, the NJ Star-Ledger caught up with Roth as he joined a bus tour of Newark, the city where he grew up and that serves as the setting for many of his stories. He had a grand time, surprising the others on the tour who, like him, but 10 years later than his 1950 date, had graduated from Weequahic High School. The Ledger's piece quotes from several of Roth's books, including this bit of lovingly remembered detail from Goodbye Columbus:

“The park ... was empty and shady and smelled of trees, night and dog leavings; and there was a faint damp smell too, indicating that the huge rhino of a water cleaner had passed by already, soaking and whisking the downtown streets.”

Thought this morning I oughta try to read all of his books. So far, for the record, I've read these: American Pastoral, Operation Shylock, Patrimony, The Humbling, Sabbath's Theater, The Plot Against America, I Married a Communist, and first of all, Portnoy's Complaint, which made me laugh out loud on the NYC subway. And that's without having tried too hard, over the course of 13 years.

The Humbling, by Philip Roth

I have just read Philip Roth's latest novel, The Humbling. Perhaps novella is a better word. It's short.
I enjoyed it, a good deal, even, but I have to wonder what the point is he's trying to make. An aging actor figures he's all washed up, can't act, but then, he finds himself in an unlikely affair, feels much happier; but then, complications ensue, and .... I won't spoil it. There's more to it than that, actually. There are echoes, for sure, of Sabbath's Theater, a marvelous book that, by chance, I read just a few weeks ago, but in that story, Roth is playing (masterfully) a massive pipe organ, all stops out, wrestling with Death. In The Humbling, he appears to be using a simpler keyboard and only dabbling. The characters are well drawn and convincing, the story well told, the sex quite Rothianic, but in the end I am left wondering. This book is a miniature and I am not sure that, Roth-wise, it is breaking much new ground. But I may well be missing something.

Henry Green

Reading Henry Green's book Loving, published in 1949. It's rich in dialog and dialect - maids and servants and butlers in a big rambling house in Ireland, during the war.

I found this in that bottomless fount of wisdom, Wikipedia: In his 1975 memoir Here at The New Yorker, Brendan Gill relates that during a luncheon at the Ritz Hotel, New Yorker editor William Shawn asked [Henry] Green what had led him to undertake the writing of Loving. Green replied, "I once asked an old butler in Ireland what had been the happiest time of his life. The butler replied, 'Lying in bed on Sunday morning, eating tea and toast with cunty fingers.'"

I look forward to finishing this book and getting on with his memoir, which I just took from the library this evening - Pack My Bag.