The Humbling - Critical Response

Critical Response

The reviews for The Humbling largely suggested that, after several books that had received high critical acclaim, Roth had taken a misstep, to be blamed in part on his extremely prolific output in recent years.

In a highly critical piece for The Guardian and The Observer, William Skidelsky resoundingly panned the novel and called for Roth to slow down, declaring:

Roth's new novel is, by his standards, dismayingly poor...it can hardly be called a novel at all; it is more an old man's sexual fantasy dressed up in the garb of literature. There are, of course, redeeming features: an interesting initial conceit, the usual beautifully controlled writing. And the novel asks interesting questions about ageing and what it does to you. But these things aren't nearly enough to make up for the absurdity at its core.

Skidelsky concluded by remarking, "On reading such a piece of scandalous frippery, it is hard not to conclude that Roth, rather than forging furiously ahead, should indeed be slowing down a little. And perhaps he should be getting out of the house a bit more."

Further negative notices came from Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times, which criticized the novel as "an overstuffed short story... a slight, disposable work". Kakutani added that Roth seemed to be "...simply going through the motions of ticking off plot points on a spindly, ill-conceived outline."

Mixed but slightly more positive notices were also forthcoming. The Daily Telegraph, which despite also declaring the novel to be "slight", went on to praise The Humbling as a "grave—and important—novel... a fine, unsettling piece of writing that deserves its place in Roth’s canon... His new work will not detain you long, but it will linger." 2008 Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga in his review for The Times declared the novel to be "...the most entertaining depressing book you’ll read this year,", comparing the novel to Roth's own highly praised Sabbath's Theater and The Human Stain, but went on to add caveats. Adiga, despite calling the novel "an original and unsettling book", also considered the novel "a failure", adding, "the language is vibrant, the sex is smutty, there are some lovely surprises in the narrative — yet, like Everyman, it lacks the wider social engagement that made American Pastoral or I Married a Communist so memorable. Like Everyman, it is a voluptuous essay on extinction masquerading as a novel."

One of the most positive reviews of the novel came from Jesse Kornbluth who declared it "Roth's best work in years; sentence for sentence, paragraph for paragraph, he's still the most readable serious writer we've got." Kornbluth went on to praise numerous aspects of the novel summing up with what amounted to an open tribute to Roth and his writing: "This is a long way from the summer romance of Goodbye, Columbus. But Philip Roth was 26 when he published that. He's 76 now. He's outlived all of his rivals. He's our most prominent novelist. And over 30 books, he's learned how to disturb us — and keep us reading. The Humbling is haunting proof."

In December 2009, actor and director Al Pacino purchased the rights to the novel for the purposes of creating a film adaptation. The film is currently in pre-production.