In
The Humbling, Simon Axler, a renowned 65-year-old stage actor, finds that he's lost his ability to act. His self-confidence gone, with his wife departing soon after, Simon finds himself adrift without a purpose to his life. He contemplates suicide, but his inability to perform leaves him unable to perform that task either. It's not until he begins a relationship with Pegeen that life seems worth living again. She's a 40-year-old woman who is the daughter of Simon's friends and had recently been a lesbian. She brings a spark to his life and Simon even imagines starting a family with her. Until Pegeen leaves him too. Philip Roth's thirtieth novel has received mixed reviews with BookPage saying, "In this searing novel, Roth adds dark shadings to the austere vision he has explored in recent works like
Everyman and
Exit Ghost; there are precious few shafts of light that break through his clinical examination of one man’s catastrophic fall from grace. But in recounting with unrelenting precision the grim story of Simon - not a bad man, simply a tragically human one - Roth offers another unflinching assessment of the essence of our mortality."
