The Humbling
By Philip Roth
Jonathan Cape £12.99, 140 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

What would have happened if the manuscript of this piece of short fiction had been sent, unsolicited, to five or six British publishers? If, instead of being FedExed direct from a New York agent straight to Roth’s English editor, it had arrived in a plain brown A4 envelope with the morning’s mail? If the Pulitzered, PEN/Faulknered, National Book Awarded name “Philip Roth” hadn’t been anywhere near it?

It would have been rejected. On grounds of length alone, it would have been rejected.

At best, the work experience person who looks through the “unsoliciteds” would have spotted talent; the external reader asked for a second opinion would have concurred; the editorial assistant would have seen a chance to bring something unexpected to the next commissioning meeting; the editor would have said no but decided to write the author an encouraging letter including the following words: “ ... potential ... current situation in publishing ... impossible ... Are you working on a novel?”

There is no contradiction in saying that The Humbling is, at one and the same time, a masterpiece and a piece of fiction that, unless it did admit to being by Philip Roth, would stand no chance of being published.

I’m calling it a “piece of fiction” because, at 140 wide-margined pages, it falls into that indeterminate area midway between short story and novel. Henry James, who has been one of Roth’s models since at least as far back as The Ghost Writer, would probably have referred to The Humbling as a nouvelle – a work to place alongside his own Daisy Miller, The Aspern Papers and especially The Beast in the Jungle. James would have recognised the qualities of swiftness, concision, focus, plus a thematic ambition that short stories tend to avoid. There are kinds of fictional intensity which nouvelles alone can achieve.

Like almost all of Roth’s works, The Humbling is about sex, death, fame and language. Like his recent works, Everyman and Exit Ghost, it is about all of these things plus ageing. Sex plus ageing, death plus ageing, and so on. Working through these simple sums brings us to impotence, suicide, humiliation and lateness. These are what The Humbling is explicitly about.

The Roth stand-in character (there’s always one) is Simon Axler. He is an actor who, in his mid-60s, discovers he can no longer act. The bravura opening pages anatomise him: “He screamed aloud when he awakened in the night and found himself still locked inside the role of the man deprived of himself, his talent, and his place in the world, a loathsome man who was nothing more than the inventory of his defects. In the mornings he hid in bed for hours, but instead of hiding from the role he was merely playing the role. And when finally he got up, all he could think about was suicide, and not its simulation either. A man who wanted to live playing a man who wanted to die.”

The explicitness here is of a sort that a younger Roth might have avoided: Axler is a man who can’t perform, therefore an impotent man. The Humbling of the title seems already to have occurred to Axler before the story starts. To be humbled is to be reduced to a lower or lesser state than before, yet still to be around to experience that state. You don’t humble someone to death, although you may humble them so badly they go off and kill themselves.

This is what happens to Axler. Which isn’t to give the plot away – he is tragically doomed from the first word. As we read the book, we watch his Three Acts play themselves out. The final section is called “The Last Act”.

Axler is constantly trying to work out whether what he’s engaged in counts as an Act, an act or an action. Some of Roth’s darkest comedy issues from this confusion. After Axler’s wife leaves him, he commits himself to a psychiatric hospital. Here, he’s encouraged to take part in art therapy. When the therapist asks what he’s drawn, Axler says “a picture ... of a man who has broken down and who commits himself to a psychiatric hospital and goes to art therapy and is asked there by the therapist to draw a picture”.

As is usual in late Roth, the older, broken man is still somehow capable of attracting an attractive younger woman – in this case Pegeen, an academic lesbian on sexual sabbatical. It is their excruciating affair that pushes Axler towards The Last Act. There are elements in this that ring bogus. The dialogue is often too crafted to be believable speech. The sex scenes read as wish fulfilment. Yet many artists have been able to combine masturbation fantasies with great art. Picasso, for example. And Roth has been refining his self-pleasuring schtick since The Breast and Portnoy’s Complaint. He’s now a master masturbator.

Toby Litt is author of ‘Journey into Space’ (Penguin)