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.

Richard Kliman has the misfortune to be both an outwardly virile young man and a biographer. Either one would be enough to annoy a 71-year-old novelist, aware that his reputation will soon fall out of his own hands, beset by the side effects of a radical prostectomy—impotence, incontinence—and yet still possessing undiminished narrative powers. No, the writer is not Philip Roth, but one of his fictional alter egos, Nathan Zuckerman. Zuckerman shares his creator’s oft-noted belief that biographers are the enemy of literature, along with book reviewers, academic literary critics, and the cultural journalism of The New York Times.

At least Kliman isn’t trying to write Zuckerman’s biography, though he wants the old man’s help with a planned book about an even older writer, E.I. Lonoff, the reclusive genius of Roth’s first Zuckerman novel, The Ghost Writer. (The density of Roth’s fictional universe is such that every summary now requires an allusion.) Kliman’s research has led him to Amy Bellette, Lonoff’s former student and mistress, the young lady with the strange foreign accent “from the country of fetching,” whom young Zuckerman had imagined to be a still-alive Anne Frank. Now 75 and suffering from a brain tumor, Amy unwittingly provides Kliman with a terrible Lonoff family secret. “I assume the great secret is sexual,” Zuckerman scoffs when Kliman tries to tell him about it, and it is, of course. “You’re going to redeem Lonoff’s reputation as a writer by ruining it as a man. Replace the genius of the genius with the secret of the genius. Rehabilitation by disgrace,” Zuckerman tells him. The stakes couldn’t be clearer: The old literary lion returns once more to the fray to defend the cause of literature against this newest philistine who cannot understand that art uses facts only to create its own kind of independent truth.

Zuckerman understands his dislike of Kliman is, in part, a natural turn of fortune’s wheel:

I’d been treated by writers and critics, then in their forties and fifties as though I didn’t and couldn’t know anything about anything, except a little something perhaps about sex…. If I dared speak, these elders would scornfully shut me up, sure that I knew nothing because of my age and my “advantages”—advantages wholly imagined by them, their intellectual curiosity never extending to anyone younger, unless the younger one was much younger and pretty and a woman.

One of the wonderful things about Roth as a novelist is his desire to make both his characters’ and readers’ judgments of situations more complex, to bring every motive to the fore. Yet this characteristic effort to do his best for the enemy does not, in this instance, prevent Zuckerman from believing that his own struggles against younger and older generations are more legitimate than those waged against him. He knows he’s right; and, as the novel is set up, it’s too easy to see it his way. Kliman’s callowness is more callow than young Nathan’s. He is not a would-be novelist, as was Zuckerman in The Ghost Writer, or even a critic, but a would-be biographer, without a contract or even an agent. He does not want to shape literary taste, only reputations. Reputation has replaced taste. “I know you,” Zuckerman thinks. “It’s another of your entitlements to do harm should you want to. And, strictly speaking, it’s not harm that you do—merely the fulfilling of a right you would be a fool to relinquish. I know you: you wish to gain the approval of the adults you clandestinely set about to defile. There’s a cunning pleasure in that, and safety too.”

Of course Kliman claims, not insincerely, that he really does want to rescue Lonoff’s reputation for posterity: “He should be in the Library of America,” he says. “Singer is, with three volumes of stories. Why not E.I. Lonoff?” Even in earnest, this is an impotent form of ambition. The young Zuckerman of The Ghost Writer, in contrast, wanted to be, one day, a living immortal. He could imagine himself “the only living writer to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America.” He would not be a mere curator in the haunted museum of literature. Kliman may meet Zuckerman in jogging shorts after a dash around Central Park’s Great Lawn, displaying his tanned, exercised body, but he doesn’t even have what it takes to carry on an affair with his old college girlfriend. This is, naturally, what Zuckerman imagines he’s doing, because it’s what young Zuckerman would do; Zuckerman’s fantasy life, even at his age, is anything but castrated.

There’s a good deal that’s accurate in Roth’s depiction of Zuckerman’s latest epigone and antagonist. Roth’s grasp of what makes Kliman both prematurely aged and regressively adolescent isn’t conveyed through Zuckerman but through Jamie Logan, the college ex-girlfriend who defends Kliman: “Richard’s not alone, he lives in a careerist world, a world where if you’re not careerist you feel like a failure. A world that’s all about reputation. You’re an older person coming back, and you don’t know what it is to be young now.” This historical change in the meaning of male youth—a mix of attention seeking, risk aversion, and a heavy sense of belatedness—is one of the subtler themes of the novel, and one that provides it with that dash of “news” that all novels need.

Kliman isn’t the only specimen of youth Zuckerman encounters. There’s also Billy Davidoff, Jamie’s husband, “a chubby young man with a soft, agreeable manner,” a description that unpleasantly recalls a harem eunuch. Billy, Zuckerman says, “seemed to take pleasure in deferentially calling me Mr. Zuckerman.” Billy is a more honest kind of venerator, not just of Zuckerman, but of his own wife: “It was clear that she was considered by them the more brilliant of the two and that his personality was swaddled in hers.” In Zuckerman’s eyes, little Billy becomes “a masterpiece of male devotion.”

Zuckerman meets these young aspirants when, in a sudden regression to old habits, he browses the New York Review of Books classifieds and comes across an ad for a house swap. Billy and Jamie want to flee the Upper West Side—she’s frightened of an imminent terrorist attack and can’t concentrate on writing—and Zuckerman has grown suddenly tired of his reclusive retreat in the Berkshires. He needs to return to the city he left behind (just before September 11th, 2001) for an experimental treatment, an injection of collagen that might abate his incontinence and restore some of his dignity—and maybe, with a ghost of a chance, his virility.

The hope that he might somehow avoid “the gifts reserved for age”—the extinction of desire, calm of mind, all passion spent—leads Zuckerman into his latest fantasy. It’s built around 30-year-old Jamie, who is apparently endowed with every virtue—intellectual and moral—Roth can bestow. The daughter of Houston oil money and Bush pioneers, she’s escaped her privileged background, nursed her older sister until her death from Lou Gehrig’s disease, read lots of 19th-century literature, and been published in the New Yorker—not to mention that she’s tall, slender, and dark haired, with “a creamy, impeccably soft surface.” Zuckerman’s infatuation takes over the night of the 2004 election, as he sits in Billy and Jamie’s apartment watching the results come in. The scene actually works as a fantastic novelization of Yeats’s last poem, the one that begins “How can I, that girl standing there/my attention fix/On Roman or on Russian/Or on Spanish politics.” (If Roth hadn’t already led with a Yeats allusion in The Dying Animal, he could have called this one Politics and gotten away with it.) There’s a lot of politics here, but it’s politics as background noise, an insistent hum of anxiety and despair. The 2004 election confirmed the suspicions of Roth’s counterhistorical novel The Plot Against America: A country governed by fear is no country for young men or young women.

All this is atmosphere. But Exit Ghost is mostly a novel of atmospheres—the terror-saturated air of New York, the pervasive disappointment and despair of all good liberals on the morning after the 2004 election, the feeling of approaching death, from natural and unnatural causes, and an uncanny library mustiness, thick with literary and other artistic predecessors. This is a novel dense with references to other late works and people recently and not-so recently departed. Strauss’s exquisite Four Last Songs repeats as a leitmotif, an impromptu and lengthy obituary for George Plimpton breaks into the novel for seven pages right before the dénouement. Zuckerman’s thoughts, too, bristle with allusions to works, all of which make light or heavy use of ghostliness: Eliot’s Four Quartets, Conrad’s The Shadow Line, Hardy’s Return of the Native, Ibsen (although it’s Hedda Gabler and not Ghosts). The effect of all this allusiveness is, as Zuckerman observes of Lonoff’s work, like “the enigmatic reverberations of a gong.”

The reverberations actually create the feeling of an enigma. Nothing in this novel is straightforward; everything works by association, inversion, and buried association. Roth mentions Macbeth but not Hamlet; the stage direction “Exit ghost” appears in both plays. Yet in a novel that asks so many questions about the right moment to die, our duties to the dead and our literary forefathers, and in which Zuckerman describes himself as “losing his mind,” Hamlet is everywhere. The plot of Hamlet turns on usurpation. Of course the young taking over from the old is supposed to be a natural progression, and yet Zuckerman, forever young, still feels that the world of literature, of the women he desires, are all being unfairly taken away from him.

Roth’s Hamletizing works by inversion. The disconcerting spectacle of an older man as action hero, out to save a dead man’s reputation, gets taken over by the force of feelings generated by Zuckerman’s entanglements with characters young enough to be his children. The sexual secret Kliman has discovered about Lonoff—that he had an incestuous affair with his half-sister—is really another screen for Zuckerman’s own anxieties about his posthumous reputation as a novelist and as a man. “Once I was dead who could protect the story of my life from Richard Kliman?” Zuckerman muses. “Wasn’t Lonoff his literary stepping stone to me? And what would my ‘incest’ be? How will I have failed to be the model human being?” Yet Zuckerman’s incest is hiding in plain sight. What else is a 71-year-old man’s desire for a 30-year-old woman? It’s the same sin young Zuckerman stumbled upon in The Ghost Writer. Not only did Zuckerman then imagine himself as Lonoff’s spiritual son, but the family included Amy as well: “Oh father, is this so, were you the lover of this lovesick, worshipful, displaced daughter half your age?”

Still dedicated after all these years to the most irresistible and therefore most dangerous varieties of straight male desire, Roth actually plays it too safe with Exit Ghost, safer than he did in the earlier novel he revisits and tries subtly to revise, as though atoning for Zuckerman’s earlier betrayal of Lonoff—the eavesdropping, the story that Lonoff predicted young Nathan would write about him—by writing the same novel from the point of view of the older writer. Still, it is for purely physical reasons, rather than moral ones, that Zuckerman’s guilt-haunted seduction of Jamie Logan cannot be carried out. Lonoff, on the other hand, that impossible master, was meant to be a figure of what 23-year-old Zuckerman saw as “mad, heroic restraint.” “You cover yourself now,” Lonoff tells the young Amy, when she strips for him. In Roth’s universe, it’s an axiom that sexual restraint is usually madness. If Exit Ghost is indeed, as Roth has hinted, the last of the Zuckerman novels, it’s a pity that he denies Nathan one last chance to be good, sparing him the burden of confronting the madness of restraint for himself. Or perhaps this has been Roth’s point all along: Our final exit resolves nothing, but if we’re lucky, like Zuckerman, we get away unscathed.