Word: rothe
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These days, Roth is about as prolific as he is grim. His most recent novels have all dealt in almost expository detail with the subject of death and its inextricability from the spectrum of human experience. “The Humbling,” with its three-act structure and its otherwise bare narrative that alternates predominantly between dialogue with Axler and his inner-monologue, could essentially serve as an allegory for Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. The entirety of the novel, from Axler’s time...
...contingency.” For Axler, this consummate performance, this total surrender of the self in the acknowledgement of the world’s pervasive spectacle, is an act of transcendence. Within the novel, however, it reads more simply; as desperate, as derivative, as meaningless. This is the book Roth has delivered: the rules don’t just prevent you from winning; they prevent you from even playing...
...must recount and scrutinize the events that lead to his expulsion from Winesburg College and a death sentence at the front lines of the Korean War. Like in “The Humbling,” the thematic and narrative concerns of that book seemed more important to Roth than the construction of an illuminating or sympathetic relationship with the character. The ambiguity that permeates “The Humbing”—of age, of gender, of morality—and the subtlety and variety with which it’s applied, makes it clear that Roth...
...pages, Roth never gives “The Humbling” any opportunity to be more than an exercise in writing that can be ‘read’ in those various ways. Roth seems to have given no consideration to an emotional center to his novel, and purposefully so. And while this provides for a fascinating project—doubtless a project only made possible by a genius like Roth’s—this fascination never translates to enjoyment. Nor does the admiration one may hold for Roth’s vaunted corpus ever translate...
...familiar figure from Jewish literature that dates back to the Old Testament and up to Bruce Jay Friedman's 1962 novel Stern, about a Jew who moves to the suburbs and endures a plague of abuse from neighbors and nature. The men at the center of Philip Roth's novels may rage and flail, but Larry doesn't dish out insults, he takes them. When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, just suck it up and hope you don't explode. That's Larry's method of coping. In Stuhlberg's precise...