The Humbling by Philip Roth

Philip Roth rests so heavily on his laurels you couldn’t lift him with a crane. When I consider how enthralled I was of Portnoy’s Complaint, the Zuckerman novels, and especially his head-spinningly brilliant output in the 90’s, it’s hard for me not to be dismayed by his recent stuff. Granted, I hope I can write like he can when I’m pushing seventy-five, but I also hope I’m not writing the same kind of story for the thirtieth time.

Perceptual Exercise: A spotlight shining through the stage, or a giant glacial spike crashing from beneath it?

Roth’s newest work, The Humbling differs from most of his other novels in the following ways:
1.    The protagonist isn’t Jewish
2.    The protagonist isn’t a writer
3.    The protagonist isn’t from New Jersey

Simon Axler, a gentile stage actor from Michigan, discovers at age sixty-five that he’s lost his magic. He can’t remember lines, he can’t speak them convincingly, he can’t embody a character, and as a result he breaks down and commits himself to a mental institution. Months later, he returns home and is resigned to languish in his unemployed depression until Pegeen, the daughter of his friends, shows up at his house.

What is a Roth novel without the man having an affair with a woman at least twenty-five years his junior? (Hint: Not this one.) The same tension from The Human Stain, The Dying Animal, etc. plays out in The Humbling with the Rothian man once again thinking, This is going to ultimately destroy me if I don’t stop but sweet Jesus what a piece of ass.

Thank God it at least explores some new territory. The zinger is that Pegeen is a lesbian, or has at least lived as one for the past seventeen years before she meets up with Simon. This goes all sorts of interesting places. Simon recovers his pride, thinking he’s mastering the shift in Pegeen’s sexual preference and thereby reasserting himself as a man. He also plays the Pygmalion, spending piles of money to get her out of her androgenous campwear and into jewelry and heels. Her feminization is so thorough she becomes unrecognizable to her own mother. While it seems that Simon is subjugating Pegeen, though, we later learn he was never necessarily in control. This creepy struggle for gender identity comes to a head one night when, at Pegeen’s suggestion, they bring home a female stranger from the bar.

Personal Fact: 10+ Roth novels later and I’m still not quite comfortable reading the sexual escapades of a geriatric.

This isn’t the sort of story that will make new Roth fans, but the familiar build to disaster does keep the pages turning for the established ones.

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

Roth doesn’t quite pull off writing as a stage actor, at least for me. I’m no pro by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve done a lot of theater and wonder where Simon’s mentions are of the tedious rehearsals, the energies of different audiences, and various other details that would authenticate him as a stage performer.

Because as it turns out, almost nothing Roth says about Simon’s craft of acting can’t also be applied to the craft of writing fiction. People have always had trouble separating Roth from his protagonists, and this doesn’t help. It’s as if he’s inviting us to assume that many of Axler’s anxieties about losing “the touch” in his art are his own.

So the author enters the novel to a distracting effect. If you like Roth, though, you should be used to this, and I at least found the ideas on this sort of artistic impotence to be disturbing and engaging nonetheless. It also saddens me a bit because I see it happening right there on the page, Exhibit A, in a novel that does familiar gesturing but lacks punch.

This book would have been far worse if it weren’t over so quickly; as it is, it has more than enough substance to fill its 160 pages. I think fans ought to give The Humbling a read as long as they don’t come into it expecting a return to form. There probably won’t ever be one—if we’re to take Simon as an example.

Hemingway vs. Norris: Am I pwned?

A while back I started posting facts about Ernest Hemingway as a testament to his toughness, as if I were wholly original in doing so. Imagine my surprise when I discovered I was not the first to posit that Big Papa could kick Chuck Norris’ ass.

A thread on pbnation.com has me beat by four years. These warrior poets, you’ll see, debated fiercely on the virile merits of each contender, bringing several truths to bear on the discussion. In the end, it was the proponent of Hemingway who won out.

So while I am disappointed to find my thoughts were less than visionary, today I walk with more sureness in my stride knowing that I am not steered wrong.

Truf.

Great Literary Theories of Mine #1: The Personality Vacuum

Have you ever read a novel where the protagonist was generic and indistinct, but it wasn’t a bad thing? Maybe you felt that this even worked to the novel’s advantage.

Would you say that Harry Potter, the character, is a terribly interesting individual? Is he replete with quirks that distinguish his personality from yours? If not, is that to the books’ detriment? Maybe it’s because you care less about what Harry thinks or does and more about what is happening around him. This makes it easier to meld your identity with the hero’s and experience the story directly from his perspective, even in third-person narration.

It’s not like A Catcher in the Rye, where the interest in the book lies overwhelmingly with the character who is talking to you… and what passes for a plot in the book is less of a concern. What I’m thinking of are the novels that you don’t merely want a window into: you want them to surround you, and the only thing to impede that would be a distinct protagonist.

Twilight. Everybody knows those books aren’t about Bella. Talk to the fans—nobody gives a flippity fuck about Bella. They don’t even want to be Bella—but they want to be in her situation. A protagonist as weakly drawn as she is makes it easier for the reader to supplant her and take on her role as they read, which, among other things, means having a gorgeous, super-powered, alluringly dangerous boyfriend who rescues you from everything (and though I could be wrong on this, readers who don’t find Edward appealing have little reason to enjoy these books). If Bella were a more well-rounded and distinguished character I don’t think the Twilight series would have as many fans as it does.

Now, I encountered the personality vacuum once again in The Magicians. Lev Grossman may or may not be aware that he’s employing it—I can’t decide. But it’s there, and it functions just as it does in the Harry Potter books, with the hero, Quentin, being unremarkable and me not minding that. But eventually it breaks down: at one point, Quentin, filled with both the ennui of his idle post-graduate existence and vanity of his new Manhattan party-life, becomes an insufferable piss-ant. He becomes conceited, superficial, obnoxious in conversation with his friends, and worst of all he cheats on his terrific girlfriend. All of this would not be an issue in a different book and would be overpowered by the fact that it’s an interesting character development, but Lev, you don’t understand: I am Quentin now, and I don’t want to be a piss-ant.

This feeling later passes as Quentin’s ordeal leaves him emotionally shaken by the end of the book. He’s finally sympathetic again, but in his newly rounded characterization he’s forever spliced from me, and I’m not sure if I like that as much as when I experienced The Magicians without the middleman.

So a vanilla protagonist, I think, benefits the reading experience in special cases—chiefly the ones where the draw of the book is the World the author has created, one that the reader would find thrilling to inhabit.

But the effect must remain consistent, the hero must remain nonunique, or else it’ll produce the slight shock of separation in the reader somewhere along the way.

Either that or I could be really weird.

The Magicians by Lev Grossman

You’re supposed to be tight with children’s fantasy novels in order to truly appreciate the new book, The Magicians. Maybe, but I’ve discovered that it isn’t necessary in order to enjoy it.

By the end of this book, at least one tree goes up in a fireball.

You see, what we have here is half Harry Potter, half Narnia, with plenty of hard alcohol.

17-year-old Quentin Coldwater has a fixation on two things: magic tricks and the children’s fantasy novels, “Fillory and Further.” Each of those is about to become a lot more real.

His plans to enter Princeton go awry when he arrives for the interview to find the aged interviewer dead. One of the paramedics on the scene, who is off-puttingly cheerful, hands him a book and a note on the sly. This note later flies off on a gust of wind, and Quentin follows it to suddenly find himself on the summery campus of Brakebills magic school. There, in a crowd of other overachieving strangers his age, he takes an entrance exam and passes it. Fogg, the Dean of Brakebills, tells him about the kind of operation they’re running, and presents Quentin with a choice: enroll and learn magic or go back to Brooklyn.

Quentin of course takes the red pill. And off the story goes as it follows him through his undergraduate studies in sorcery and the bizarre adventure he and several classmates embark on afterward.

Lev Grossman is imaginative in the classic sense, appealing to the kid in you that genuinely enjoyed J.K. Rowling and C.S. Lewis. But surrounding the wondrous concept of magic in this novel is a very interesting ennui. Learning sorcery turns out to be mind-numbingly dull for the students, for each spell has to be conjugated (like verb tenses in language) for everything from the spellcaster’s gender and birthsign to the phase and position of the moon. There are hundreds of conjugations just for a spell that allows its caster to hammer in a nail straight in a single shot.

And more profoundly, nobody seems very happy. Becoming an accomplished and powerful magician is no guarantee of the good life. If anything, it condemns the mage to the opposite. Quentin and the other aimless graduates fall on alcoholism and sleeping around and quite frankly become toxic assholes. This is a deliberate point made in the book, and numerous times the question is raised (and never satisfactorily answered) as to why magic schools even exist. Any global good produced in its spellcasting alumni is marginal, and it’s very troubling to some of the characters that such young people would be cultivated to wield so much power that they’re not ready to have.

So this sort of de-romanticizing of magic makes the novel feel surprisingly realistic. Couple that with the “Fillory” books-within-a-book, which add this layer of “that’s the fantasy, this is the reality” verisimilitude. I’ve never encountered a novel quite like this one, nor seen its unique and disturbing concept of magic before.

One of the professors explains magic by using the famous anecdote of philosopher Bertrand Russell, who was approached by an interesting lady after he gave a lecture. She argued to him that the world actually stood on the back of a giant turtle. Russell, amused, asked then what the turtle was standing on, to which the lady replied it was another turtle. What was that turtle standing on then, asked Russell, and the lady said, “It’s turtles all the way down.” The magic Professor had this to say about the story:

‘The woman was wrong about the world, of course, but she would have been quite right if she’d been talking about magic. Great mages have wasted their lives trying to get at the root of magic. It is a futile pursuit, not much fun and occasionally quite hazardous. Because the farther down you go, the bigger and scalier the turtles get, with sharper beaks. Until they eventually start looking less like turtles and more like dragons.’

Grossman sometimes gets in the way of his own very good book; someone ought to have trim the fat off his prose and taken a look at his frequently weird modifiers that don’t quite work. There’s another even larger character issue that emerges toward the middle of the novel (something I’m compelled to explain later, as it applies to a Great Literary Theory of mine), but The Magicians is a fun novel even for someone like myself who’s only sampled the fantasy genre. You keep reading to watch the turtles become dragons.

Sherman Alexie: Kindle is Still Meh

Sherman Alexie did some controversial soapboxing against e-readers earlier this year, calling the Kindle “elitist” because of its high pricepoint. At some point after these remarks, Amazon gifted him a Kindle. Well how about those fellas?

Advance Magazine asked him if his opinion of the Kindle changed at all now that he’s had one of his own to play with. Mind you, here’s a strong representative of the Print Purists (of whom I am one in many respects), people who are leery of e-readers because… well, ain’t nothing like a book in your hand. If Alexie can be converted I’m certain most of us can. Here’s what he had to say about his Kindle experience:

I have to say I’m still not impressed. I certainly understand the convenience of storing 1,500 books in a small device, and I definitely appreciate that these electronic readers make it easier for people with certain physical challenges. But I utterly fail to understand how somebody could let such a device become their primary method of reading.

Book reading is a tactile process—one can see, feel, smell, hear, and taste a book—but a digital reader is rather sterile. A friend of mine said, “Reading a digital book is like masturbating with a condom on.” Another friend said, “If you can’t read in the bathtub, what’s the point?”… Another friend said, “I like to measure my progress when I read. I like to see the pages being turned. I like to see that I’m getting near the end of a book. With the Kindle, it always feels like I’m on page one.” Of course another friend said, after playing with my Kindle for awhile, “This thing is awesome, you idiot. If you don’t want it, give it to me.”

Now, the “sterility” is an accurate naming of what bothers many of us about a Kindle—as if the digitization robs what we’re reading of personality. Can you imagine, though, a fifteenth-century yeoman bitching about the printing press because, although it makes books far more widely available, it lacks that special, personalized quality of the monk who wrote your book out by hand?

I don’t think we miss that anymore. Give it a few hundred years, give it maybe less, but I think we’ll get over the Kindle’s sterility, too.

Alexie went on to say that in the near future there will be a clear division between the kinds of books that are bought in each format: popular fiction will sell more ebooks, but literary fiction, however, will sell more print books. (But won’t that make print books elitist, Sherman?) This does make sense.

Because Kindle isn’t what I picture myself reading hearthside. At least for now. This Print Purist loves a heavy, utterly obselete hardcover pulled down from his quaint bookshelf.

But on a plane? On a train? There I can see the advantages of an e-reader, even if in spite of the differences Alexie’s friends have cited above. (And I have to say— “Friend” who made the masturbating observation has just earned 25 points.) There’s a reason we call them airport books. Patricia Cornwells and James Pattersons will have a grand old time on people’s Kindles and iPhones because those novels lend themselves to that on-the-go, wholly undemanding reading style. If I ever get an e-reader I’m filling it with my genre books, almost exclusively.

My favorite classics, though? The Dante, Shakepeare, Dickenson, Hawthorne, and Fitzgerald books are the ones I must, as Alexie describes, “see,” “feel,” “smell,” and “hear.”

But I don’t need to “taste” them. Sherman Alexie can “taste” them if he wants, I just won’t.