Roth contemplates role of suicide

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This article was published 21/11/2009 (6154 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Humbling

By Philip Roth

Hamish Hamilton Canada, 140 pages, $30

Philip Roth, one of America’s most celebrated novelists, is now 76 and turning out books at the rate of one a year. Though the novels are shorter these days, they are no less provocative than his early ones.

His latest is the fourth in a row to deal with some aspect of death. This one is a succinct — in fact, rather skimpy — and attention-grabbing look at what causes people to consider suicide.

His 2006 offering, Everyman, was a masterpiece on the subject of mortality. In 2007, Exit Ghost saw Roth’s alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman lamenting the aging process. In 2008, Indignation was, among other things, a contemplation of the afterlife.

Simon Axler, main protagonist of The Humbling, is a renowned actor who has lost his talent. Now in his mid-60s and living in rural New York, he is filled with nothing but doubts. He’s had a well-publicized breakdown onstage. His wife has left him.

Axler spends time in a psychiatric hospital, where he hears a variety of personal stories of failed suicide attempts. He thinks about killing himself. He is fascinated by the great number of suicides in classical drama: Hedda Gabler, Willy Loman, Ophelia, Othello, Phaedra, Jocasta, Antony, Cleopatra, Romeo, Juliet, to name only a few.

"Suicide is a subject dramatists have been contemplating with awe since the fifth century B.C., beguiled by the human beings who are capable of generating emotions that can inspire this most extraordinary act." Axler wonders: could the act of suicide be his greatest role?

The Humbling is presented in three parts — like a three-act play — and at the beginning of Act Two, just as you are expecting a book-long meditation on suicide, Roth provides a respite from this downer theme: a woman 25 years younger than Axler appears at his door.

She is Pegeen Mike Stapleford, daughter of old friends of Axler, and she’s been living as a lesbian for 17 years.

Working as a professor in Vermont, she’s been abandoned by her female lover and now she’s decided she has the hots for old Simon. We quickly find out that his breakdown hasn’t affected his sexual prowess.

He spends a great deal of time and money on her, transforming her into a stylish heterosexual.

"Perhaps because she looked so good in his eyes she did not bridle at continuing to submit to his ministrations, alien though that might have been to a lifelong sense of herself. If indeed hers was the will that was submitting — if indeed it wasn’t she who had taken him over completely, taken him up and taken him over."

Axler begins to believe she can revitalize him, but there are complications. The female dean who employs Pegeen has designs on her, and there’s the problem of how Pegeen’s parents, both actors who have never achieved the stature of Axler, will react to their daughter’s bedding down with their old buddy who’s their age.

When Roth permits his elderly actor a surfeit of carnal capers, you know that it isn’t going to last. Nevertheless, though Roth is trying for tragedy here, one can’t help but think that Axler’s time with Pegeen isn’t exactly purgatory.

Dave Williamson is a Winnipeg novelist.