The Humbling: A Novel

"Direct and urgent, a taut and controlled fever-dream that demands to be experienced at a single sitting . . . Roth is a master." -Los Angeles Times

"A vitally important addition to Philip Roth's already amazing body of work." -The Philadelphia Inquirer

"Blooms brightly in the extraordinarily fecund garden of his late work . . . A swift but piercing, uncluttered but nuanced morality tale." -NPR

"Philip the Great, Philip the audacious, the voracious, writes of bottomless hunger-emotional, sexual, existential." -O, The Oprah Magazine

Simon Axler, one of the leading American stage actors of his generation, is now in his sixties and has lost his magic, talent, and assurance. His Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya, all his great roles, “are melted into air, into thin air.” When his wife leaves him, and after a stint at a mental hospital, he retires to his upstate New York country house and hopes for deliverance, which arrives in the form of the lithe, vibrant, and ever-subversive Pegeen Stapleford, the daughter of old friends and twenty-five years his junior.

In this tight, surprising narrative told with Roth’s inimitable urgency, bravura, and gravity, we confront the terrifying fragility of all our life’s performances.