Good, bad, and ugly: I can understand how The Humbling can be interpreted as an elderly Roth’s pathetic longing to return to his sexual prime. In the novella, an actor certainly modeled on Roth turns lesbians straight and has sex with women 20-40 years younger than him. That’s the bad. The ugly is that the women he encounters are portrayed less as people and more as objects whose sexual and romantic interest in him may restore his acting ability, which is the underlying conflict of the story. Performance anxiety appears as an obvious metaphor. The good is that I don’t think this book is terrible, or even bad really. From a readability standpoint, the prose is as crisp and comical as ever. Roth’s autobiographical style of fiction is well-written and Roth is wonderful at tying together a story. The end of the novel also does somewhat subvert the reader’s expectation about my “ugly” point, as Roth’s (“Axler” in this story) young mistress realizes that their relationship is substituting his creative career and leaves him, but Roth duly suggests that it’s because she was actually a lesbian the whole time, which reflects a pretty immature and insulting attitude toward homosexuality. Even though he walks this back at the very, very end, the mere suggestion is disappointing. So It doesn’t completely nullify Roth’s tone deaf exploration of sexual achievement as a metaphor for/solution to writer’s block. But there’s yet an additional layer that Roth reveals: Axler’s identity crisis. How he doesn’t know how to “act” even as himself. Roth absolves himself of some criticism by painting Axler as an ultimately tragic, pathetic, an unsympathetic character. There is therefore some distancing between author and character (unusual in Roth’s canon). Overall, it’s a spiteful and problematic book. But I did appreciate its quality writing and story telling.