Roth's The Humbling

I just finished reading Philip Roth's The Humbling. Generally I have enjoyed his recent fiction (especially Exit Ghost) and been impressed with the continuing high quality of his work in his 70s, but even so I was surprised with how good The Humbling is both in terms of aesthetic quality and plot (i.e., the enjoyable quality of the story--it's a good yarn). The protagonist Simon's story ends up being the traditional Roth plot of a megalomaniacal man who is incapable of seeing other peoples' actions as anything other than slights against him (though this time he's not a self-hating Jew), but with the twist (for Roth) thrown in that the woman he desires and seduces is a lesbian.


This is where the book becomes problematic. Virtually all of Roth's protagonists are horribly misogynist, but their idiocy is clear to readers: their anti-women feelings are so intense that the characters become caricatures (as Roth intends) and we know to disagree with them. However, The Humbling's treatment of lesbianism (not to mention its flat, stereotypical, oppressive treatment of transgendered persons) is much more muddied. Simon's love interest, Pegeen, has just been jilted by her lover and now views lesbianism as a "seventeen-year mistake" (61). So of course she follows the stereotypical questioning lesbian narrative of "let's find a penis to help me through my problems; being heteronormative is obviously what I need to help me through my life issues." (This narrative is also evident most recently in Julianne Moore's character from the film The Kids Are All Right.) When she and Simon first have sex, she tells him that his penis "fills you up [...] the way dildos and fingers don't" (92). At this point the dialogue resembles badly written pornography for straight men.


Pegeen leaves Simon at the end of the book, which would seem to reject her previous rejection of lesbianism, but we are not told what happens to her once she leaves. She might go back to women or she might not. Roth has, of course, made a career of writing troubling texts that readers are nevertheless unable to put down, and The Humbling is no different in this regard. But this is the first time that I have been unable to simply laugh it off afterward, and I am still trying to figure out how I feel about that.