Every autumn the policemen get younger and the Philip Roth novels shorter and grimmer. This year’s exemplary tale of late-middle-aged male meltdown tells of the downfall of a celebrated classical stage actor, Simon Axler, the opening paragraph setting out the premise with the bleakness of a logical proposition: “He’d lost his magic… He’d never failed in the theatre, everything he had done had been strong and successful, and then the terrible thing had happened: he couldn’t act…His talent was dead.”

From that, everything follows with deductive swiftness. Axler, freed of his moorings, goes crazy. Even his insanity has a scarily insubstantial quality: “He could not convince himself he was mad any more than he’d been able to convince himself or anybody else that he was Prospero or Macbeth.” A big, burly man has become “an insignificant mite”. He becomes obsessed with Prospero’s lines in The Tempest: “Our revels now are ended. These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits and / Are melted into air, into thin air.” He becomes obsessed with thoughts of suicide, and takes to sitting with the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth. His wife leaves him. He admits himself to a psychiatric hospital.

But that’s only the start. Just when Axler seems to be struggling back towards equanimity, Eros enters the equation (as it often does in Roth’s recent novels) in the form of a disturbed, highly sexed younger woman. In Rothland, Eros and Thanatos go together, in the words of the old song, like a horse and carriage. Once Axler has hooked up with Pegeen, a former lesbian who is also the daughter of old family friends, his self-destruction is ­simple and unstoppable.

In Exit Ghost (2007) Roth’s protagonist, the ageing novelist Nathan Zuckerman, writes of his former mentor, the short-story writer EI Lonoff, that “the novelist’s passion for amplification was just another form of excess that ran counter to his own special gift for condensation and reduction”. Roth himself has never before lacked that “novelist’s passion for amplification”, that improvisatory flamboyance that has him riffing for pages on a dialogue or idea, so that even when the story arc is pointing inexorably downwards — as in Indignation (2008) — the narrative still bubbles with mordant humour.

But The Humbling is Roth unplugged — he has done away with amplification and gone for Ockham’s razor instead. It’s a bold move, to cut out what makes your writing most attractive, and there is something admirable and bracing about the way Roth breaks the creative-writing-class rules about “show not tell” and “build a scene”. The departure of the wife is disposed of in a sentence, and the successive stages of Axler’s self-destruction are presented as a series of bald shocks, a white-knuckle acceleration into oblivion.

But there’s also a loss of flavour, a loss of voice, in the distillation. In part this is Roth’s point. Axler has lost his voice. The book’s insubstantiality is also the insubstantiality of Axler, who has “melted into air”. When the relationship with Pegeen lurches without preparation into sordid group-sex games, it seems unreal — but it is unreal to Axler; he is not himself (he was only ever himself when he was playing a part on stage). He has been taken over by Eros. Even at the end, when he is taken over by Thanatos, it is stagey — his final, desperate performance.

One can recognise and acknowledge all this, but still find it hard to warm to the book. Indeed, The Humbling is the kind of novel that renders the whole idea of “warming to” flimsy and ridiculous. Of course there are wonderful touches. When Pegeen sows the first seeds of her betrayal of him, Axler observes quietly, fatalistically, to himself: “It’s not deception her taking this line — it’s the way we are instinctively strategic.”

When Roth does paint a scene, it stands out all the more luminously for the blank backdrop: Axler minutely observes a possum retreating into its nest, a perfect analogue for his own isolation. But The Humbling remains forbidding — one for committed devotees and certainly not to be recommended as a point of entry into Roth’s ­magnificent oeuvre.

The Humbling by Philip Roth
Cape £12.99 pp160

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