Kathryn Harrison reviewed Philip Roth’s The Humbling in the New York Times. I’m a big fan of Philip Roth. Roth entitled the book The Humbling. I’ve been experiencing a humbling of sorts on the Internet of late. I’ve posted comments and attempted to carry on commentary with other people and they don’t engage. Like Roth’s Simon Axler, the actor who has lost the ability to perform, I have lost the ability to connect. The inability to connect with my words has indeed been humbling. I’m amazed that Roth has managed 30 novels, a spectacular achievement in its own right, but more importantly I’ve always connected to his work. I get what he is writing.
Kathryn Harrison does not get Mr. Roth. Like the minions who don’t seem to have a clue about what I’m trying to say in my writing, Ms. Harrison missed the boat in her review of The Humbling. She found Roth to be offensive in his depiction of the lesbian Pegeen and Simon and Pegeen’s sexual exploits. She wrote:
And, like all gay women, she has a “small plastic bag of sex toys,” among them a “strap-on leather harness” into which she inserts a “green rubber dildo.” When Pegeen cheats on Axler, twice, it’s with one and then another blonde ponytailed pitcher she seduces from the sidelines of a local softball game — because where else would an experienced, predatory lesbian go for eager, young tomboys to corrupt? You don’t have to be gay to find such stereotyping offensive. The bedroom frolics inspired by something as lurid and ludicrous as a green dildo make for embarrassing reading not because of the caliber of their sexiness, but because they demean everyone involved. Including the reader, who is forced into the position of voyeur and thereby made complicit in a vision that doesn’t allow a lesbian to be anything more than a collection of clichés. Representing her sexual orientation — as well as her gender, duplicitous daughter of Eve! — Pegeen is amoral, capricious and cruel.
Pegeen isn’t amoral, capricious or cruel in the story. She is just a lesbian, who in part due to cultural and family pressures decides to try and act straight. It doesn’t work. I find Harrison’s projection interesting on the softball players. I read the book and it sounded like she was hooking up with women who were also lesbians, not a predatory lesbian on the prowl for unsuspecting tomboys. Where did that come from?
This is a troubling aspect of the review – the book is written in the first person narrator format. Simon Axler is the narrator and he is a mess. If you are an author and creating a character in the first person, the words and commentary must fully reflect the character. If the character is wont to stereotype lesbians, his narration will stereotype lesbians. If he didn’t, the illusion of the art would be lost.
This isn’t a story about lesbians or even sex. This is a story about performance and acting. Axler moves from acting on the stage to acting a new role with Pegeen. He will even lapse into an Irish brogue when talking to her, reliving an earlier role on the stage. Pegeen doesn’t replace his acting, but rather becomes his next performance. His final performance, as outlined in the aptly named section, The Last Act, is his suicide.
I found The Humbling to be just that, a humbling meditation on the human condition, our struggle to find meaning, the difficulty to act and ultimately the humbling decision to try and control your own destiny.
Harrison wrote, ““The Humbling” lacks its author’s genius — all that would help us, as it has so many times before, to forgive him his prejudices and blind spots. “ Her prejudices and blind spot caused her to miss the meditation and reflection throughout the entire book on what it means to act or write and not connect with your audience. This is the humbling and daunting task of any artist and when you don’t connect, you really are in your last act.
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