The Humbling

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral comes the story of a leading American stage actor who’s lost his magic but finds deliverance in the form of a vibrant, ever-subversive, much younger woman.

“A taut and controlled fever-dream that demands to be experienced at a single sitting” —Los Angeles Times

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 salvation, which arrives in the form of the lithe Pegeen Stapleford, the daughter of old friends and 25 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.