The shadow of an aged phallus

FICTION: The HumblingBy Philip Roth Jonathan Cape, 140pp, £12.99

‘HE’D LOST his magic. The impulse was spent.” Thus Simon Axler, desiccated hero of Philip Roth’s svelte new novel and the latest in a decrepit line of his male protagonists to find themselves stranded late in life with nothing to console them but the twinge of geriatric desire.

A recurrent conjecture of Roth's own twilight as a novelist has been this: can sex – or the urgent outgrowth of masculine ego that passes for sex in Roth's universe – compensate for failing health and stymied ambition, even vouchsafe the elderly rouéa glimpse of the metaphysical beyond? The answer is maybe, but at the cost of considerable bathos; sexual rejuvenation easily turns to physical or emotional grotesque, and when it comes the final tumble is all the more precipitous for the hero's late shot at erotic exaltation.

In The Humbling, the hapless old lover is not in truth all that advanced in years; Axler is a distinguished American actor of 65 when we discover him considering suicide and tallying characters from the history of drama who take their own lives. His breakdown has come after a creeping, then calamitous, loss of acting ability. Following a final, disastrous, run as Macbeth he retires to his house in the country and the Remington pump-action in the attic. “Suicide,” he muses, “is the role you write for yourself.” But Axler, doubting the sincerity of his own despair, cannot convince in this last, self-scripted part – in a welter of absurd self-pity, he projects his predicament onto a possum that expires in the snow by his kitchen door.

Into this landscape of Learish last things steps Pegeen Mike Stapleford, 40-year-old daughter of old friends of Axler's and so christened after he and her parents performed in The Playboy of the Western World.(Axler's wife has now left him, and his loyal agent, after an oddly stilted exchange on the subject of age and acting, despaired of saving his client.) Pegeen arrives trailing her own fresh trauma; a six-year lesbian relationship has recently ended. "It had been some time," Roth writes, "since she'd had what she wanted rather than its grotesque inversion." The adjective is casually deployed, but it's a clue to the dismal comedy of misogynist self-regard that is about to dominate The Humbling.

AXLER AND PEGEENembark on an implausible affair, couched by turns in saccharine dialogue – "you're wonderful to me . . . you're just what the doctor ordered" – and weirdly soft-focus sex. Axler (or Roth) works hard to convince himself that that he's (taking the reader) on some kind of perilous erotic excursion, requiring alarming equipment. But even as Pegeen reveals her bright green strap-on dildo and smirks that she'll be gentle with Axler, we somehow know that this is all going to revert to Rothian type. Before long, Pegeen is proffering compliant blow jobs and purring over Axler's penis: "It fills you up the way dildos and fingers don't. It's alive. It's a living thing." There is more (much more) in this vein, up to and including Axler's engineering a threesome with a girl he and Pegeen pick up in a bar.

What's going on here, of course, is a stock pornographic trope: the lesbian conversion narrative. And in Roth's hands – no matter the emotional fantasies and fragility behind Axler's erotic renaissance, no matter the Chekhovian denouement we can guess awaits him – it's every bit as asinine as one might fear. The Humblingis a very short novel that is ruinously in thrall for far too long to the most embarrassing fancies. The plot details are painful to relate. Pegeen grows out her close-cropped hair, and Axler treats her to a new style at an expensive salon. He replaces her boyish wardrobe with properly womanish clothes. She starts to redecorate his house in pleasing neutrals. No doubt we are supposed to read these cliches as aspects of Axler's delusive hope in his dwindling future, but the dashing of his dreams when Pegeen abruptly leaves him is just as schematically rendered. As a character she has no depth at all, just a set of labels that read: voracious, hysterical, immature.

THE SUBJECT OFmisogyny in Roth's fiction has been debated many times, notably by David Foster Wallace, who wrote over a decade ago of the "radical self-absorption" of a generation of American novelists – Norman Mailer and John Updike completed the core trio – for whom writing was essentially a vigorous (Mailer) or insinuating (Updike) flow of male psychosexual energy. One can still find this sort of psychic hydraulics in The Humbling; Axler, Roth writes, "could not give and he could not withhold; he had no fluidity and he had no reserve". For sure, Roth's longer and more culturally or historically (not to say stylistically) capacious novels are far from reducible to the question of whether anything exists for his hero beyond the shadow of an aged phallus. But in The Humbling, where the stakes are supposedly intimate and creative, there is something utterly dispiriting about the restricted and predictable purview.

The deficits of character in The Humblingare quite of a piece with its stylistic enervation. The long, monologic passages of the early part of the novel – Axler and his agent, for example, trading tedious nostrums about his professional collapse – are explicable in terms of the actor's depression. But the flatness pervades the whole book, and makes it hard to care as Axler rehearses his final act. By the end of The Humbling, you may want to brain him (or his creator) yourself with the blow of a loy.

Brian Dillon's Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives(Penguin Ireland, 2009) was recently shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. A novella, Sanctuary, will be published by Sternberg Press in 2010