Last week, I wrote an unflattering column about Philip Roth. I focused most of my attention on Portnoy’s Complaint, and argued that its author was undeserving of his vaunted perch atop our collective esteem. Many of our readers were incensed, and most offered a common criticism—by ignoring Roth’s later work, went the cri de coeur, I was robbing him of his finest moments as a writer. In one variation or another, the question rang out: What about American Pastoral? Or The Plot Against America?

It’s a fair argument, and to address it we have to begin by taking stock of Roth’s evolution as a writer. Like Henry James, he has produced a body of work that is best experienced chronologically. Read your way through James from The Europeans to The Ambassadors, say, and you see a sketcher of tender, confined psychological scenes bloom into an artist capable of capturing transcendence, freedom, and others of the most elusive spirits that beat wild in human chests. What would you see if you read your way from Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus to Nemesis?

At first, youth, breathlessness, bravado, playfulness, glee. A child who grew up on the fault lines of modern America’s fiercest tremors—the Great Depression, World War II—Roth felt just enough of a quiver to sense the menace creeping underground but not enough of the heat to be forged, like steel, into a man whose words and deeds cut quick. Hence, the early novels. Hence, the giddy denunciations of community, of class, of expectations.

Roth himself summed it up best in an introduction he wrote for the 30th-anniversary edition of Goodbye, Columbus: “With clarity and with crudeness, and a great deal of exuberance, the embryonic writer who was me wrote these stories in his early 20’s. … In the beginning it simply amazed him that any truly literate audience could seriously be interested in his store of tribal secrets, in what he knew, as a child of his neighborhood, about the rites and taboos of his clan—about their aversions, their aspirations, their fears of deviance and defection, their underlying embarrassments and their ideas of success.”

His own idea of success soon led Roth away from these exuberances and toward loftier realms, the ones, possibly, he imagined more befitting of truly literate writers and their audiences. Sometime in the 1970s, Roth went meta.

There is, for example, Nathan Zuckerman, Roth’s famous alter ego, being born as a creation of Peter Tarnopol, another of Roth’s alter egos, in the 1974 novel My Life as a Man. And there is Zuckerman again, five years later, in the lovely The Ghost Writer, sharing a stuffy country house with E.I. Lonoff, a thinly veiled version of Bernard Malamud, maybe, or Henry Roth, as well as a mystery woman who may or may not be Anne Frank. By 1993, with the uproarious Operation Shylock, we have Roth—or someone who bears his name and his facial features, or both—twirling cloaks and daggers in Jerusalem, chasing doppelgängers and observing history unfold, as only post-modern history can, like bits of mosaic falling off an ancient wall.

This stage in Roth’s career was a bacchanal, and like all festivities it, too, had to end. When it finally did, the historical stage began.

To this period—lasting roughly from American Pastoral in 1997 to The Plot Against America in 2004—belong the works that seem to inspire the greatest awe in Roth’s readers. As is evident anywhere from newspaper columns to Tablet’s inflamed comments section, the perceived wisdom holds that Roth finally matured in this period into the sort of writer he was always meant to be, America’s finest portraitist, on whom nothing of the nation’s past and whims and ills is lost.

A close reading, however, reveals his canvass to be much smaller. Roth the historical is Roth at his most myopic, unconvincing, and insecure. Confined to Lonoff’s cottage, Roth was radiant; freed in a fictitious America where Charles Lindbergh is president and Jews are reviled, Roth is lost.

To make sense of history, he applies patterns: American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Plot Against America are all told from a child’s point of view or revolve around memories constructed in childhood; all involve a once-Olympian hero falling to earth; and all are thrust into chaos by rampant, radical ideology shredding the fabric of what would have otherwise been an idyllic American society.

Continue reading: flightless narcissism

Apparently not. After the talk, at a reception on the second floor, as Roth sat at a table sipping white wine with ice, I asked him if he is working on anything new. He responded affirmatively, adding that the work is only—he paused to choose his word carefully—“inchoate.” Though he still does not look his age, he looks it more than he used to, with an ever-expanding bald spot and eyes that seem ever deeper set into his head. He is The Guy now—the generally acknowledged Great American Novelist (living category)—and so, perhaps uniquely, has no need to talk to press like me, although he was always polite. How did he feel about winning the Booker Prize? “Good.” He’s won every prize—which is his favorite? “All prizes are fine.” Any comment on the controversy stemming from the award yesterday? “No.” Okay then, any comment on one of the scholars’ assertions last night that, in Roth’s canon, there is a break that occurs with American Pastoral when Roth’s characters are no longer faced with choices but rather have their fates imposed upon them? “I dunno.” “You just write ‘em?” I suggested. “Yeah.”

The crowd skewed very old—it was hardly surprising to see Elie Wiesel slip in a few minutes late. YIVO executive director Jonathan Brent introduced the evening, which consisted of four scholars—all men—giving their takes on Nemesis prior to the reading. (There was a brief Q-and-A period, made briefer by Brent’s observation, “If you don’t ask us any questions, then the sooner Philip will be doing his reading.”) Roth sat in the front row, neck craned upwards immobilely, thumbs at times twiddling, something of a king or at least minor member of the royal family watching men of court endeavor to please him.

Not that the four scholars—Brent; Bernard Avishai; Igor Webb; and Steven J. Zipperstein—didn’t take some idiosyncratic views of Roth’s work. But all arrived with the premise, as Brent put it in his introduction, that Roth “stands alone, not just here in America but abroad, as the greatest literary mind and talent of our time” and that Nemesis is “one of his truly finest works.” The discussion had an almost academic-conference feel in the erudition that was asked of—or not even asked of, but just flat-out required—of its listeners, as well as for its frank and close dissections of Roth’s novel. This was not a place to come if you hadn’t read the novel and wanted no spoilers.

First came Avishai, a Hebrew University professor with a compulsion for pronouncing foreign-language names with the utmost correctness—“J.M. Coetzee;” “Albert Camus” and for that matter “Dr. Rieux” of Camus’s The Plague; even “Zuckerman,” the surname of Roth’s famed alter ego Nathan, was pronounced with the German (or perhaps Yiddish) long, dainty, faintly “r”-inflected “u.” Avishai focused on the sense of duty protagonist Bucky Cantor feels as his friends are off in Europe fighting the Nazis and he is stuck in Newark in the summer of 1944 as a polio epidemic rages. “Bucky is not projecting being a victim of chance,” Avishai argued, “nor is he punishing himself in order to valorize some ‘mysterious design.’ Rather, he rejects living as a victim, period. For this move you cannot simply acknowledge fate, Nemesis, the gods, God, all of which implies some kind of order behind events.” Avishai’s reading of Nemesis is a bleak one.

Next was Brent himself, and, being as he is YIVO’s executive director, he focused much of his talk on the Jewish aspects of the novel and the rest of Roth’s work (“Although he treats Jews as if they weren’t Jews most of the time—that is, as human beings—his novels are nevertheless about Jews”). Ultimately, though, he too found himself drawn to Cantor’s steely resolve in the face of the epidemic—the plague—and, comparing him with the novel’s narrator, who feels none of this requirement for self-sacrifice, insisted, “The moral choice in Nemesis is not between Arnie’s compromising normality and happiness and Mr. Cantor’s hidden rage and withered self. The novel does not present the reader with a choice at all. Rather, the novel is an awakening in the reader that the one reality is inextricably bound up with the other as Ahab was with the White Whale, as Dr. Jekyll was with Mr. Hyde.”

Igor Weiss—who came up with the American Pastoral-centric taxonomy I later presented to Roth—also found a bleak book. Indeed, a bleak series of books: For with the publication of Nemesis Roth retroactively labeled four short novels he has published in the past several years with the “Nemesis” heading, “classifying,” as Weiss put it, “his recent works under the name of the most vengeful Greek goddess, a merciless and implacable enemy.” I wished there were covers to hide under.

Zipperstein came last but not least—in fact, he was the best. (It’s worth noting, incidentally, that he said that “the very best interpretive book on [Roth’s] work” is the one by my former professor, Ross Posnock.) Zipperstein spoke in the muscular, robust tones of Roth’s prose, as though he had spent the last couple of weeks reading a very great deal of it. “In Roth’s musings time and again on community, the inability to live with it or without it,” he began, “it is here that his Jewish preoccupations are most acute and fertile.” Zipperstein came prepared for the setting: The Jewish crowd come to see the Jewish author at the Jewish institution in the Jewish city. He quoted Roth in a Paris Review interview: “It isn’t what it’s talking about that makes a book Jewish—it’s that the book won’t shut up. The book won’t leave you alone. Won’t let up.” This got a big laugh.

Zipperstein continued: “If one is to look for Roth’s Jewish preoccupations—and one need not look very far—there is nowhere better to see them than in a sense of Jewry’s overheated embraces and exclusions, both born of much the same impulses, which have provided him a splendid prism through which to probe community.” Then, Zipperstein went for the kill: “Is there another people that praises its achievers, that polices its boundaries, that punishes its miscreants with the fervor, the torrent of righteous indignation meted out at one or another time to Philip Roth or Hannah Arendt or for that matter Richard Goldstone?” Boom, as we say.

More: “Is it mere happenstance that Judaism’s entry into modernity is punctuated by the afterglow of Spinoza’s own excommunication from the community? The appearance of that solitary person, shorn of obligatory fellowship, cooly isolated, and whose identity is so indelibly marked by its being now and always communally adrift?”

I don’t mind quoting Zipperstein at length because it reads kind of like Roth (lesser Roth, to be sure, but still Roth), and as though sensing this, Zipperstein proceeded to quote from some of the best Roth there is, in Portnoy’s Complaint:

They might as well have had plates in their lips and rings through their noses and painted themselves blue for all the human sense they made! Oh, and the milchiks and flaishiks besides, all those meshuggeneh rules and regulations on top of their own private craziness! It’s a family joke that when I was a child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm and hopefully asked, “Momma, do we believe in winter?” Do you get what I’m saying? I was raised by Hottentots and Zulus!

The crowd was laughing. But the joke was on them! Whom did they think poor Alexander Portnoy is referring to?

Of course Portnoy’s Complaint is a youthful and barbaric yawp if ever there was one. But the thread does run through Roth’s work, and if a break can be discerned pre- and post-American Pastoral, perhaps it is that before that mid-‘90s work, the community was stifling the Jewish individual, whereas after it the Jewish individual—the non-Jewish professor of The Human Stain, locked into the Jewish identity he has foisted upon himself; Bucky Cantor and indeed American Pastoral’s Swede Levov, with their ludicrous, self-imposed stoicism—has voluntarily accepted the community’s stifling.

But that’s just my theory. We will certainly never get a straight answer from Roth, who apparently prefers instead just to write ‘em and, I can report, keep writing ‘em.

Earlier: Roth Wins British Prize Amid Controversy

I’m not exactly sure how this happened. I’ve been a book nerd all my life, having grown up in a household full of crowded shelves, where the most appropriate Shabbat afternoon ritual was a trip to the library. My grandparents’ homes were full of books by the Major Jewish Writers—Bellow, Malamud, Singer, Roth—but my parents (though they both work in the Jewish world) were less interested in them.

As I got older and started writing about books professionally, Roth’s supremacy was unavoidable: He was always collecting awards, making everyone’s top-10 lists, serving as a reference point for critics talking about sex in literature, Jewish identity, misogyny, and New Jersey—all things I ostensibly cared about. His face regularly peered out from articles in newspapers and magazines, and his unsmiling face with its graying orbit of hair was familiar in a way that made me look past it and on to articles about new writers, whose books were so often positioned as rebuttals or complements to Roth’s legacy.

Not having read any Philip Roth felt alternately reprehensible and like a point of pride. Could I actually appreciate the landscape of contemporary fiction without him? On the other hand, we all have to build our own canons, and everyone’s education has its gaps, intentionally or not. (I knew I couldn’t be alone in this aspect of my under-education; there had to be plenty of well-read people who had their own reasons for having avoided him, too.) And I’ve always been skeptical whenever a author is hailed as the savior of literature, the Great American Novelist, or the embodiment of all we could hope for in a writer—whether that writer is Philip Roth or Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith or Roberto Bolaño. Slowly, though, the fact that I didn’t know Roth’s work started to feel like an opportunity, a rare chance to approach something with relatively few preconceptions. Sure, I knew the basics: Roth was prolific, Jewish, aging, cranky, and venerated. But how did his books read? Would I like them?

With his 31st book, Nemesis, arriving this month, catching up on him completely was a daunting and not entirely pleasant prospect. And I didn’t really want to try. After all, if I wanted to fully understand Roth and his intimidating oeuvre, I would read all 31 of those books, along with critical biographies and anthologies and interviews that detailed the experience of reading him from just about every possible perspective, along with Claire Bloom’s scathing memoir of their relationship, Leaving a Doll’s House. I would read through hundreds of reviews and consult the experts at the Philip Roth Society. Instead, I just wanted to find out what it was like to persist on a Philip Roth diet for a few weeks, to see what it would feel like and if it would tell me anything about the way I read. I wanted to know if Roth was a writer it was even possible to get a general sense of, by dipping my toes into a few supposedly exemplary novels. So, I didn’t read 31 books. I read eight.

The way I chose those books was far from scientific, based on casual suggestions and availability as much as the specifics of Roth’s bibliography. His first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), was an obvious choice, and as the novel that made him famous (and both exalted and reviled), so was Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). Someone told me they thought I’d like The Counterlife (1986), which seemed as good a tip as any, and I took home The Plot Against America (2004) both because I’d heard great things about it, and because it was already at the library instead of needing to be transferred in. I added Everyman (2006) to my pile for the same reason (and also because it was nice and slim when compared to most of the others, as well as relatively recent), and The Breast (1972) because, well, it’s about a man who turns into a giant boob. I knew I wanted to read American Pastoral (1997) because it won Roth the Pulitzer Prize, and Patrimony (1991) because I figured a memoir would offer a different angle on the author. Skipping around seemed legitimate, since I wasn’t trying to understand Roth’s evolution as a writer in any kind of comprehensive way, but to see what came of ploughing through a stack of his books in a concentrated amount of time.

Even if I wasn’t sure what I would actually find in these hundreds of pages, I knew what I was supposed to find. The promotional copy on many of the books was comically over the top: It seemed like each one was hailed as Roth’s greatest triumph, the one boasting his most indelible characters, the rawest emotion and deepest cultural relevance, and the author glared out from his photo as if daring anyone to contradict the superlatives. The aura of undisputed greatness triggered competing impulses in me: On one hand, it’s reassuring to read books that have already been vetted and generally agreed to be excellent. Another part of me, though, was annoyed that adoring Roth should be a foregone conclusion.

Portnoy’s Complaint, I realized just a few pages in, is a book you really need to immerse yourself in—it should be read in as few sittings as possible. With very few section breaks and a careening narrative (the whole thing is truly a relentless, exhausting complaint), the best strategy is to get into the groove of Alex Portnoy’s voice and let it pull you along. And with little to hang on to in the way of structure, it’s the characters and small stories that stick: Alex’s account of his young cousin’s suicide, his ambivalence about his girlfriend (whose serious sex appeal can’t make up for what he thinks of as her unrepentant stupidity), another cousin who almost married a goy and then died in the war, the horror movie (and indelible, odious archetype) that is his mother. Portnoy’s life is one long, sickening Jewish joke; Roth is trying so hard to repel and frustrate us that reading becomes a sort of test of will.

I knew the book by reputation, of course, but the repulsive, repressive Jewishness at its core was still extreme enough to be jarring. It’s certainly to Roth’s credit that the book still shocks more than 40 years after it was published, especially considering that at a certain point, its literary value became inseparable from its cultural cachet. That’s the challenge of reading a book that’s become shorthand to such an extent that The Daily Show jokingly called it “the Jewish manual” on the same night I finished it. Somehow, though, Portnoy’s Complaint still stands on its own.

After that, reading The Plot Against America was a relatively soothing experience, and something of a stylistic shock. The historically complex novel is impeccably structured and straightforwardly told and makes Portnoy look like a sheer cathartic exercise in comparison. On a basic level, The Plot Against America is just a great read: It’s accessible and vivid and suspenseful along with being a smart, sly history lesson. Reading Roth’s alternative history of the period preceding America’s intervention in World War II and knowing this is not what happened to American Jews in the 1940’s (but could have, given some choice unfortunate events) makes you want to know more about what actually did. Something about tracing the divergence of history and fiction fixes the facts in your head better than the usual accounting of them and made me think the book would be an inspired way to teach anyone from high-school students to forgetful adults about the period. In a different way, Goodbye, Columbus also felt to me like it belonged on a syllabus, so much so that I was hearing reading comprehension questions in my head as I was reading: things like, why does Neil care so much about the kid in the library? Why does he insist that Brenda get a diaphragm? What does the title actually suggest? The Breast was similarly ripe for essay questions. It also just works: It’s short, funny, and disturbing, with the blend of comedy and pathos that defines absurdity.

I found The Counterlife harder to get lost in, though I know that’s part of the point of the book’s structure—its multiple “lives” and shifts in perspective are meant to be disorienting, each chapter set in a new time and place that forces a reader to start from square one each time. That idea appeals to me, as does Roth’s fascination (very much on display in these pages) with calling his readers’ attention to the way a story is constructed. Still, there was just so much speechifying here, so much yelling about who was right and wrong, and the stakes never engaged me.

But I thought American Pastoral, which also had some meta qualities (and which I was similarly primed to think was genius), was staggeringly good. I loved how Roth built the saga of his main character, Swede Levov, out of the memories of his own alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman, so that Zuckerman’s personal reflections drive nearly the whole first quarter of the book, before the character smoothly shifts his attention to imagining the Swede’s story. In these layers of authorship and invention, it’s not just Roth writing the book, but Zuckerman building it out of his own memories and feelings about the past, fiction upon fiction. There’s a lot going on here—high-school sports, family tensions, political violence, sex, cattle-breeding, embattled optimism, blackmail, urban ruin, the bizarrely fascinating specifics of how to manufacture women’s dress gloves—but the entire book is riveting and deeply sad, revolving around lost dreams and ideals and an underlying question of “why me?” that one might call biblical if it didn’t instead resonate as distinctly, terribly American. It’s that rare novel that kept me reading long past the point when I planned to go to bed, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

The day after I finished American Pastoral, I read Patrimony in three hours. Roth’s memoir of his elderly father’s decline was harrowing, lovely, and impossible to put down, its ending inevitable but the exact path to it heartbreakingly uncertain. Lucid and forlorn, he’s writing about the experience of memory here as much as he’s recounting specific ones, and they’re memories that actually belong to him, rather than ones he’s ascribing to his various fictional stand-ins. After reading so much that represented a meeting of his life and fiction, the Roth who is writing here seemed strikingly exposed. There’s nothing sexy or glorified, just shit smeared all over the walls and a son tasked with cleaning up the mess.

This felt like a reasonable, tidy way to conclude my reading spree. But Everyman—the first of Roth’s recent cycle of short novels—was still sitting at the top of the pile next to my coffee table, taunting me with its brevity.

For all its slimness, Everyman struck me as one of the bleakest books I’d ever read. It’s not merely depressing, but insistently, painfully grim. The book is a fairly concise chronicle of an aging man consumed by his mistakes, and it makes growing old sound like the hardest, loneliest, and most desperate situation a person can be in, to the point where it seems to have been written from a place of utter fear and despair. A few of the plot points were drawn directly from the pages of Patrimony: the severe heart trouble Roth recognized just in time to save his life, how he made a wrong turn on the way to visit his father and ended up at the crumbling cemetery where his mother was buried. In Patrimony, Roth writes that while that accidental detour offered him no comfort, it nonetheless left him satisfied because it felt “narratively right.” It was an apt way to describe the broader relationship between his life and work, and it was strangely gratifying to see so clearly how he’d translated that particular experience into fiction—15 years after he described it in a memoir.

Everyman left me so despondent that I worried it would color my feelings about Roth’s other books. But that might have happened had I finished with any of the others, too (albeit with a different aftertaste). And in the end, my Philip Roth binge made it hard for me to think of any one of his books as an individual work. Read together, they left behind a web of allusions and cross-references and authorial obsessions and outbursts and reflections that I’m happy to leave all tangled together in my head, letting the Nathan Zuckerman of American Pastoral touch base with his younger self from The Counterlife, having Swede Levov explain his familial knowledge of glove-making to the nameless protagonist of Everyman (who himself has some expertise in the fine jewelry trade), and letting Alex Portnoy and Goodbye, Columbus’ Neil Klugman swap stories—while all the female romantic interests get together to compare their own notes on this group of tortured Jewish men. Read on a bender like this, the connections between stories and characters and themes all but broadcast themselves, and I got a better sense of the man behind them than I would have had I read American Pastoral by itself, in installments the length of a subway ride.

We read, I think, to confirm things we assumed, as well as to be surprised by what we didn’t know. And timing matters. All of us remember books we’ve read at the wrong point in our lives—too soon, or too late—or in a moment that felt almost overwhelmingly perfect. There are books whose specifics drifted away soon after we finished the last page and others that we think about often, for reasons we don’t always understand. Maybe if I’d read different books by Roth, or the same ones in a different situation, my opinion of them would be less favorable. Maybe if I added just one more book to the stack, I would have gotten too sick of him to have anything positive to say.

Or maybe not. Discovering Philip Roth this way was totally unnatural, but it felt totally right. And, hey—now I’ve read Philip Roth.

Few writers in their mid-60s have the ambition, not to mention the stamina, for the kind of self-reinvention Roth undertook 15 years ago. But late Roth, it turns out, was not the last disguise the shapeshifter would assume. That phase, it is now clear, came to an end in 2004, with the publication of The Plot Against America, the last of Roth’s large, backward-looking novels. 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.

Axler, like Roth, is a world-renowned artist entering old age; like Roth (and like E.I. Lonoff, the writer-recluse of The Ghost Writer), he lives in almost total seclusion in a farmhouse in the Berkshires. But Axler has also lost his talent and confidence, which can hardly be said of a novelist who continues to publish a book a year. Or can it? Certainly Roth has not suffered any conspicuous, demoralizing failure, as Axler did when “he was asked to play Prospero and Macbeth at the Kennedy Center—it was hard to think of a more ambitious double bill—and he failed appallingly in both.” This debacle, coming after a series of bad performances, drove Axler from the stage, and even brought on thoughts of suicide. Very early in The Humbling, when Axler’s wife leaves him, he comes so close to pulling the trigger that he checks himself into a mental hospital.

Axler’s artistic humbling may not reflect Roth’s experience. But whatever power and interest The Humbling possesses comes from the reader’s sense that it does reflect Roth’s apprehensions. After all, Roth is too unsparing a writer not to realize that The Humbling, like its predecessors, represents a dramatic shrinking of his fiction’s power and scope. The book is very short—a novella at most—and thinly imagined, with few surprises in plot or language. Roth’s characteristic rant—the vengeful, self-justifying, exhilarating speeches in which his characters define their anger and appetite—has shrunken, here, to Axler’s repetitive querulousness:

What was he doing in this hospital room? A self-travesty had come into being who did not exist before, a self-travesty grounded in nothing, and he was that self-travesty, and how had it happened? Was it purely the passage of time bringing on decay and collapse? Was it a manifestation of aging?

The one element of wildness, of transgressive energy, to be found in The Humbling is, ironically, the most ordinary of all, coming from Philip Roth: sex. The book’s first section, “Into Thin Air,” ends with Axler refusing his agent’s offer of a role in a Eugene O’Neill play. He has come to terms with his loss of talent and, at the standard retirement age of 65, resigns himself to a futureless future. “Something fundamental has vanished. Maybe it had to. Things go,” he ruminates. But the next section is titled “The Transformation,” and it shows Axler suddenly reinvigorated by a challenge even greater than O’Neill.

That challenge is Pegeen Mike Stapleford, a 40-year-old woman he has known since she was born. She is the daughter of two old friends of Axler’s, fellow actors who never made it big; she was named after a character from Playboy of the Western World, in which all three of them were playing when she was born. If the title of the Synge play seems like a prophecy of Axler’s imperial libido, Pegeen Mike’s bisexual name is a symbol of her lesbianism. Yet, in what cannot help reading like a parodically macho Rothian development, no sooner does Pegeen show up at Axler’s house than she falls in love with him and decides to become straight.

“It had been some time since she’d had what she wanted rather than its grotesque inversion,” Roth writes, and Axler goes about inverting her inversion with a complacency that I imagine almost any reader under 40 will find absurd, if not offensive. (“Then he led her to the sofa in the living room, where, blushing furiously as he watched her, she undid her jeans and was with a man for the first time since college.”) Like Jimmy Stewart with Kim Novak in Vertigo, Axler buys Pegeen new clothes and gets her hair cut, making her into the woman of his dreams: “In the New York stores, after trying on something new in the dressing room, she’d come out to where he was waiting for her to show him how it looked and to hear what he thought.”

But if Axler remembered the Hitchcockian parallel, he’d know that this kind of egoism does not go unpunished. “Converting” Pegeen, Roth allows us to see, is the great challenge and gamble of Axler’s late life: if he has the charisma and potency to turn her straight, then he might no longer be the wreck we met in the first pages of the novel. He begins to dream about returning to the stage, and even of having a child. But in the savage sexual warfare of Roth’s world, there is nothing more dangerous for a man than to put so much of his self-worth in a woman’s hands: “Eventually a day will come, Axler thought, when circumstances render her in a much stronger position for it to end, whereas I will have wound up in a weaker position merely from having been too indecisive to cut it off now. And when she is strong and I am weak, the blow that’s dealt will be unbearable.”

The title of the The Humbling leaves no doubt that the blow is coming. We can see an image of Axler’s future in Louise, Pegeen’s last lover, whose jilting has turned her into an obsessive, jealous wreck. And Axler seems to be tempting fate by introducing women—first a fantasy, then a real one—into his lovemaking with Pegeen, in passages that allow Roth to show that his boldness in writing about sex has not deserted him. (By far the most memorable scene in the book involves Pegeen’s green strap-on dildo.)

In The Humbling, as in Exit Ghost, Roth does not indulge his hero’s dreams of being young and potent again: as Philip Larkin wrote, we all know what “the only end of age” must be. It is only this remorselessness that rescues The Humbling from its undoubted limitations; that, and the fascination of watching a writer who has written so well, for so long, negotiate with a certain dignity the equally remorseless humbling of his own gifts.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series.