A good definition of a major writer, in fact, is that even his bad books matter—if not for themselves, then for what they say about the mind that created them. Nemesis (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26), Roth’s new novel, is a case in point. For the last six years, since the publication of his last great book, The Plot Against America, Roth has been producing short novels at an accelerating pace, but with declining powers. This is quite natural for a writer in his late 70s, and the subject matter of these works—impotence, old age, and death—are equally appropriate to the closing phase of Roth’s career. In the “books by” page at the beginning of Nemesis, we find that he has now grouped four of these recent books together in a new category: Along with the Zuckerman books, Roth books, and Kepesh books, each named after their protagonist/narrator, there is now “Nemeses: Short Novels.”

The new book, then, gives a name to this sequence, which also includes Everyman, Indignation, and The Humbling. As the word “nemeses” suggests, each is about a man brought low, by a combination of his own flaws, bad luck, and the relentlessness of time. But since the protagonist of each book is also a shadow-version of Philip Roth, these stories have a power in excess of their slight fictional achievement. In each case, Roth seems to be imagining an alternative fate for himself, a variation on his own life that ends in failure or disaster, rather than fame and glory. In Indignation, Marcus Messner actually speaks from beyond the grave—he is a young man who, tormented by sexual guilt, drops out of college and gets killed in the Korean War. And in last year’s The Humbling, Simon Axler is an aging actor who loses his self-confidence and virility and is ruined by his attempt to regain them in a last love affair.

Nemesis, the latest installment in this sequence, is also the worst. In part this is because of the thinness of the prose, which has next to nothing of Roth’s grand style—the indignant, self-justifying rant learned from Céline, balanced between laughter and fury. There are sentences in Nemesis that, in their expository limpness and characterlessness, seem to have no authorial mind behind them at all:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, polio’s most renowned victim, had contracted the disease as a vigorous man of thirty-nine and subsequently had to be supported when he walked and, even then, had to wear heavy steel-and-leather braces from his hips to his feet to enable him to stand. The charitable institution that FDR founded while he was in the White House, the March of Dimes, raised money for research and for financial assistance to the families of the stricken.

The language gives itself away: “renowned,” “vigorous,” “charitable institution,” “the stricken,” are all clichés, and the whole thing sounds like it could come from a history book for young readers. This may be a clue to the problem: Roth seems to be writing for an audience that has never heard of the 1940s—of FDR, polio, or D-Day (later on, we hear about how soldiers “parachute into Nazi-occupied France … against the stiffest German opposition”). Of course, this describes none of the likely readers of Nemesis, and the disconnect suggests that Roth has become too isolated—by age, fame, or habit—to successfully imagine his own audience.

The story, too, has a young-adultish plainness and didacticism. Bucky Cantor, the hero, is a 23-year-old P.E. teacher in the Jewish Weequahic neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey—the setting of Roth’s own childhood, which he has explored in many books. It is the summer of 1944, and Bucky is working as a playground director, running baseball games for the neighborhood kids. And it’s through the kids’ eyes that we see him: Roth chooses to narrate the story in the voice of one of Bucky’s students, despite a good deal of narrative implausibility, because it allows him to halo the young teacher in childish admiration. When Roth writes that “His was the cast-iron, wear-resistant, strikingly bold face of a sturdy young man you could rely on,” you know that, as in a movie, countenance is character.

Bucky’s heroism is tested by an outbreak of polio in Newark, which claims the lives of two boys from his playground. At first, he is as plucky as his name requires, attending the victims’ funerals and comforting their families. Even more important, he tries to stop his neighbors from working themselves into a suspicious panic. At the time, Roth reminds us, it was not known how polio was transmitted, and as in The Plague, ignorance breeds paranoia. Did the dead boys catch the virus at a hot dog stand, or from a slovenly, mentally retarded boy, or from the spit of an Italian gang that trespasses on the Jews’ turf? Bucky keeps insisting that it is wrong to give in to fear, to blame the Other—a familiar moral to a familiar story, which unspools in foursquare Hollywood fashion. There is a tearful eulogy for an angelic child; a kindly, reassuring neighborhood doctor; and even a devoted girl for Bucky—Marcia Steinberg, the doctor’s daughter, who wants nothing more than to marry him.

But it is Marcia who turns out to be the cause of his undoing. She is working at a summer camp for Jewish children, far from the polio outbreak, and she arranges for Bucky to be offered a job there. His sense of duty—heightened by his guilt at being unable to fight in World War II, thanks to his bad eyesight—tells him to stay where the trouble is, even though realistically he can do nothing to stop the children of Weequahic from getting polio. But his love for Marcia and his instinct for self-preservation lead to him to accept the camp job. What ensues is an idyll, which—again as in a movie, a horror movie this time—becomes more frightful the more perfect it appears, since the reader knows that Bucky is not going to be allowed to get away with his transgression, no matter how minor. In the end, he is punished in a terrible fashion, and a coda, set decades later, shows that the events of that summer ended up ruining his entire life.

In only two ways is this story markedly different from a Hollywood melodrama of the period in which it’s set. The first is that, because the epidemic afflicts a Jewish community in 1944, there are faint but very deliberate reminders of the destruction even then being visited on European Jews. These echoes are the more powerful because Roth seldom insists on them. When rumors surface that Weequahic is going to be quarantined, for instance, the description of the plan—“They would close it off at the Irvington line and the Hillside line and then at Hawthorne Avenue and at Elizabeth Avenue. … They even printed a map”—sounds just like the way Jewish quarters were barricaded, for very different purposes, in Vilna and Warsaw. The image of Jews as disease-carriers, too, was central to the Nazi ghettos, and when it surfaces in New Jersey, the result is a historical vertigo like the one Roth created so effectively in The Plot Against America: “The anti-Semites are saying that it’s because they’re Jews that polio spreads there. … Some of them sound as if they think the best way to get rid of the polio epidemic would be to burn down Weequahic with all the Jews in it.”

The subject of Jewish suffering naturally leads to the subject of theodicy. Why, Bucky wonders, did God allow the children of Newark to be decimated? Why did He create the polio virus in the first place? This questioning is pitched at such a rudimentary level that it leaves the reader a little unsettled—surely Roth is not suggesting that taunts like Bucky’s (“Look, your God is not to my liking. … He spends too much time killing children”) are going to strike any reader with the force of a revelation. In the book’s last section, the narrator finally gets the chance to reproach Bucky in the way the reader has been doing silently all along: “this is nothing more than stupid hubris … the hubris of fantastical, childish religious interpretation. We have heard it all before and by now we have heard enough of it, even from someone as profoundly decent as Bucky Cantor.”

But if Roth realizes how melodramatically unoriginal Bucky’s story and Bucky’s thoughts are, why write Nemesis? The answer, as with Roth’s last few books, is simple and moving. He is writing these counter-deaths in order to prepare for his own death; he is writing because writing has been his life, and each new book is an extension and assertion of life. When we do start talking about Roth in the past tense—which may not be for many years—it is in this sympathetic light that, I think, his very late work will be viewed.

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.

Here’s a question raised by Philip Roth’s new novel, Indignation: Where does it fit into his body of work?

Indignation takes place in the early 1950s on the campus of Winesburg College in Winesburg, Ohio—yes, we are to believe, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio—a tradition-bound school not unlike Bucknell, where Roth spent his undergraduate years. The novel is narrated by Marcus Messner, in some sense a typical Roth protagonist: a nineteen-year-old son of Jewish Newark who transfers to Winesburg after his father, a kosher butcher, begins to hound him obsessively and fearfully about the dangers of adult life. For Marcus, Winesburg is his shot at independence, but no sooner has he arrived than he discovers that the school is fraught with subterranean intrigues, with nuances a sheltered kid like him cannot perceive. Very quickly, he sheds two roommates and falls for the WASPy Olivia Hutton, a suicidal beauty with a scar on her wrist and a flair for fellatio. He also comes up against the dean of men, a model of Midwestern Christian temperance.

In the dean—indeed, in the very atmosphere of Winesburg—Marcus teases out a thread of anti-Semitism. “More than a few times during the first weeks,” he reflects about his weekend job waiting tables in a college tavern, “I thought I heard myself being summoned to one of the rowdier tables with the words ‘Hey, Jew! Over here!’ But, preferring to believe the words spoken had been simply ‘Hey you! Over here!’ I persisted with my duties, determined to abide by the butcher-shop lesson learned from my father: slit the ass open and stick your hand up and grab the viscera and pull them out; nauseating and disgusting, but it had to be done.”

Still, as much as Marcus feels judged or out of place, this is a chimera, for Jewishness is little more than a sidelight in the book. Rather, Roth has in mind something more elusive: to look at the duplicity of our institutions—family, education, society itself—and explore how, in the face of that, we may find ourselves overwhelmed by “the terrible, the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result.” And herein lies a clue to our initiating question: Indignation is neither a throwback to Roth’s earlier writing nor a departure from what we have come to expect of him; rather, it is the latest expression of a shift that began to mark his work in the 1990s.

Sometime over the last two decades, Roth’s image shifted in the public mind. Regarded since the 1959 publication of his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, as a quintessential Jewish-American writer, the 1990s saw him emerge as a decidedly American writer, one who took on broader, more collective themes.

Most attribute this to the publication of what became known as his American trilogy: American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain. In fact, though, the process was more gradual than one might assume. In his 1986 novel The Counterlife, Roth overtly reckoned with the intersection of the individual and the wider world—in this case, the relationship of his fictional alter ego Nathan Zuckerman not just to his Jewishness, but to how that Jewishness marks him in the disparate historical and social landscapes of London, Israel, and New York.

Nevertheless, The Counterlife was still very much consumed by that grand Rothian obsession—identity, the question of who we are and how we play ourselves, the way the stories we tell become inextricably woven into the fiber of our beings. All of this changed markedly with the 1997 release of American Pastoral, a book Roth had been thinking about for a generation or more.

“At a certain age,” Roth explained to me in a 2004 interview, “I was able to look back at decades, and see that I had lived through what’s called American history. American Pastoral came out of notes I’d made some fifteen, maybe twenty, years earlier at the end of the Vietnam War.”

American Pastoral, which dealt with a middle-class daughter’s descent into violent political radicalism, was followed by I Married a Communist, set during the McCarthy era, and The Human Stain, which framed the Clinton impeachment summer as emblematic of an ongoing strain of American Puritanism, played out as part “of an enormous piety binge, a purity binge, when terrorism—which had replaced communism as the prevailing threat to the country’s security—was succeeded by cocksucking.” This is classic Roth, the conflation of the sexual and the ethical, but the vision in The Human Stain was expansive, a cultural rather than a personal point-of-view.

The apotheosis of this shift, I believe, was reached with The Plot Against America, which, appearing in the midst of the 2004 presidential campaign, imagined an alternate history in which Charles Lindbergh had been elected to the White House in 1940 and entered a loose alliance with Nazi Germany—an irresistible allegory for anyone looking to draw connections between literature and contemporary life.

Roth, of course, denied these associations, arguing that he’d begun working on The Plot Against America too early—at the start of the Bush administration—to have any such agenda in mind. But while I’m willing to believe that these intentions were not conscious, allegory is in fact what he has been producing for many years. How else are we to read the American trilogy if not as an elaborate allegory for the failure of America’s egalitarian promise, for the hypocrisies and divisions (political, social, moral) that continue to tug at the American soul? How else do we confront the “what if?” of The Plot Against America except as a fantasia of our most nativist tendencies spiraling out of control?

Even the least political of Roth’s recent work has its allegorical underpinnings, and, in fact, it could be argued that his entire career embodies the push and pull between the Puritans and the rest of us, between what Roth describes in his 2001 novel The Dying Animal as “godly virtue and right reason” on the one hand and “misrule” on the other. And yet, Roth wants us to consider, why are these the choices? “Why is it rule and misrule?”

The title of Roth’s latest novel serves as a directive. This is a book, he means to tell us, about a state of being; it’s not so much Marcus’ story as it is the record of his reaction to events. It is, in its way, an allegorical construct, a cautionary tale about what happens when something gets the best of us.

And yet, the title also encapsulates the essential flaw of the novel, which is that, whatever Roth’s intentions, the stakes this time out are simply too low. His narrator here is not only nineteen but a young nineteen, so lacking in experience that when he has his first sexual encounter, his response is not elation but incomprehension. “How could such bliss as had befallen me also be such a burden?” Marcus wonders. “I who should have been the most satisfied man in all of Winesburg was instead the most bewildered.”

Even more bewildering is a summons from the dean, who calls Marcus into his office to discuss his inability to adjust to Winesburg’s campus life. This is the kind of tour de force set piece at which Roth excels—think of the El Al hijacking in The Counterlife, or the retirement community concert at the start of Patrimony—and yet here there is a careening quality to the action, as if the writing were not fully under control. Marcus questions the dean’s assumptions about his heritage, then harangues him on free will and the fallacy of religion, quoting Bertrand Russell‘s “Why I Am Not a Christian” to this most Christian of men. It’s a moment ripe for humor, and yet Marcus cannot see the irony of his position, the ridiculousness of the situation in which he finds himself. He is too…indignant. In this version of the struggle between Thomas Morton and the Puritans, the Morton stand-in is a straw man, a pale reflection, unable to sustain the allegorical weight.

There’s one more reason Marcus lacks the force to support Indignation‘s intentions: death. This is the other great subject of Roth’s later work, also going back to The Counterlife, a novel in which he kills Zuckerman in one section and brings him back to life in the next. The best parts of The Human Stain and The Dying Animal deal directly with the subject—”In every calm and reasonable person,” declares David Kepesh in the latter, “there is a hidden second person scared witless about death”—and Everyman is transfigured by it, into a fugue on mortality and futility, the cold emptiness of the abyss.

And yet, if death plays a part in Indignation also, it exists primarily as an abstraction, especially when Roth deals with it head on. Marcus is worried about Korea, terrified that he might lose his deferment and have to go to war. This is the specter that hovers over him, that hovers over all the young men in the novel, but perhaps because Marcus is so inexperienced, it never seems entirely real. As if to mitigate this, Roth works in an oddly hallucinatory (even otherworldly) framing device, but without giving anything away, it only distances us further from the emotional center of the book.

What makes Roth brilliant, after all, is his willingness to go after the thing itself, whether it is the collapse of American destiny or the more personal collapse of each life toward the grave. His best work is an attempt to assert the primacy of the individual, no matter how fleeting, in the face of dissolution and death. If we have only one life, why live it in shackles? Why not—like Zuckerman or Thomas Morton—stand up to convention and make a more authentic reckoning with the world?

This is the thread that runs throughout Roth’s fiction, and it becomes explicit in the “Historical Note” with which he closes Indignation, a brief coda linking the events of the novel to “the social upheavals and transformations and protests of the turbulent decade of the 1960s,” which eventually come to “hidebound, apolitical Winesburg,” as indeed they must. On the one hand, Roth appears to be making a point about fallout, reminding us that even a story told in such a minor key as this one has ramifications we might not readily see. At the same time, he’s returning to the topic of his major conflict, the tension between obedience and freedom, between “right reason” and “misrule.” It is a failure of the novel that Roth feels he has to do this; better, I’d suggest, that the narrative stand or fall on its own. But in the end, this may be less a matter of intention than of execution, which makes it an allegory of an entirely different sort.