Philip Roth, The Humbling, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 140 pp, $22.00

In The Humbling, Philip Roth has created a three-act tragedy for famed stage actor Simon Axler, now in his mid-sixties.  In act one, “Into Thin Air,” Axler mysteriously loses his ability to act, his wife leaves him to his misery, and he finally checks himself into a psychiatric clinic.  In act two, “The Transformation,” in his seclusion in rural NY, he begins an affair with Pegeen Mike Stapleford, the forty-year-old daughter of old acting friends.  Pegeen has been a lesbian since college, and the affair with Axler, which occurs after her lover had decided, with no input from Pegeen, to undergo an operation to become a man, surprises them both.  Finally, in act three, “The Last Act,” Axler must cope with Pegeen’s termination of the affair, an event he had more or less expected but which he had convinced himself wouldn’t occur.

Laid out thus schematically, it’s easy to see the trajectory of the novel, but it takes a bit more delving to see what’s at stake in such a tale.  Roth brings to the story a serious and powerful grasp of final things that has driven his other recent short, emphatically focused novels Everyman (2006) and Exit Ghost (2007); all evoke the rueful feeling of aging and of no longer being able to take for granted one’s gifts and one’s ability to fulfill one’s desires.  An actor unable to act makes the predicament of age become not only an artistic problem, but allows Roth to push at the basis of social interaction.  For the idea of self that keeps us coherent is a role, or a series of roles, we have learned to play.

The notion that how we play our social and sexual roles is amenable to change, and that we can create all sorts of new frissons by opting for other possibilities, is the theme signaled by Pegeen Mike’s sudden change of sexuality.  In exploring “the transformation,” Roth, whose fiction is firmly planted in the contested realms of sexual politics, has fun with the notion that gender is a role, and that a lesbian, as a phallic woman, creates new sexual possibilities with other women and with men, if she so chooses. The fluidity of desire becomes very heady for Axler, but also, because of his vulnerability in losing his metier, emotionally dangerous.

But Roth is enough of an ironist to avoid the simple reading of Axler as castrated male (loss of acting ability) who finds recovered potency as clinging, aging “sugar daddy” to a woman-loving love object who allows herself briefly to become his “make-over,” from tomboy to Prada-wearing femme fatale, only to abandon him.  It’s not that that reading isn’t present, it’s just that it’s too apparent to the characters themselves.

What is more telling is that the break-up occurs after Axler helps fulfill Pegeen’s fantasy of a threesome with Axler and another girl, Tracy, a drunken pickup.  Axler gets to witness Pegeen wield a strap-on dildo to fuck Tracy, and become “a magical composite of shaman, acrobat, and animal.”  The scene takes place to underscore that Axler, formerly the hero in the world of sexuality, is no longer “the god Pan,” and that that role has been taken, in our time, by the polymorphously perverse women of the world.  As an ironist who sees that the surest way to misery is to let a man get what he wants, Roth makes Pegeen’s sexual virility a blow to Axler rather than a turn-on.

For Axler there is no irony in his situation with Pegeen, even though he knew she was playing against type from the beginning.  But for Roth, who sees that, for men of Axler’s generation, losing the comforting roles constitutes the loss of their magical selfhood, the irony is that Axler ends up where he started.   Pegeen, as the new god Pan, giveth and taketh away — and who would base his well-being on such fleeting transformations is, as they say, in for a world of pain.

But Axler was already in a world of pain, contemplating suicide, due to the loss of his gift.  The transformation of Pegeen he engineered merely lets him play at being a director, casting her as the object of desire he most needs.  The fact that she involves her parents in her life when she begins her affair with him indicates the extent to which Pegeen really isn’t playing the character Axler has cast her as, but is in fact playing with some oedipal urges of her own.  All of this is plain to him, as Roth’s narrator, wonderfully attuned to Axler’s inner voice, makes clear.  And yet Axler persists.  If only to forestall death with one last manifestation of the pleasure principle.

In this, his thirtieth book, Roth, whose first book was published fifty years ago this year, demonstrates again his astonishing ability to delineate the prickly realities of desire.  Few authors come close to his ability to chart evenly, with comic touches and gripping pathos, the ups and downs of women’s effect upon men.  If that means his women are primarily occasions for male reflection, and that his fiction is generally a one-sided dissection of libido, it’s still true that nobody does it better.

Yesterday, a beautiful sunny day in New Haven, the NHR crew began its hand-delivery of issue #5. A video crew was on hand to capture the happenings:

1999, to be exact. On Saturday, the New Haven Review took over Lyric Hall, the antiques and restoration house on Whalley Avenue. Owner John Cavaliere has retrofitted the old vaudeville space in the back, and so what choice did we have but to throw a party to celebrate issue #5?

First, we ate and drank for an hour. The mango champagne punch was swell. Then the 75 or so guests retired to the theater, where NHR editor Brian Slattery (violin, guitar, piano), Craig Edwards (violin, guitar), and Joe DeJarnette (upright bass) played backup music as local notables (“locables”) read stories by their favorite authors. (Thanks to Laurel Silton for taking the pictures.)







Actor Bruce Altman read from Philip Roth’s Indignation and The Breast.







Alice Mattison read Grace Paley.







Janna Wagner read Lorrie Moore.







Nora Khan read James Salter.







And Lisa Sanders read Ian Frazier.

And then we drank again. And we ate more. Arlene Ghent catered, with pastries by Manjares. Have you had their brownies? I ask you—have you had their brownies?

We raised some money in pledges—low four figures, since you asked—but that wasn’t the point. The point was seeing people, meeting people. Tom Gogola was there. New Haven native Darius James, late of New York Press, was there. Katharine and Nicholas Fox Weber were there. My mom was there. Pang-Mei Chang was there, seeing John Cavaliere for the first time since high school. Bruce Tulgan and Debby Applegate were there. Betty Lockhart was there.

You were there. And if you weren’t, you should have been.

Or were you home watching this?

Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey, who is currently the James Weldon Johnson Fellow at the Beinecke, is reading at that august repository of valuable manuscripts, 121 Wall St., this Wednesday, Nov. 18th, at 4 p.m.  Read my discussion of her book Native Guard here.

Local poet Don Barkin, author of That Dark Lake, will be reading his poems on Friday, Nov. 20th, 7 p.m. at the Kehler Liddell Gallery, 873 Whalley Ave.  The event is co-sponsored by the Kehler Liddell Gallery and the Westville Village Renaissance Alliance.  Check out my article on Don’s book in this Thursday’s Advocate, or online.

Both events are free and open to the public

And on Thursday night, Nov. 19th, The Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., is holding a fundraiser.  In this unique event, audience members will be hit up for suggestions, and the Yale School of Drama folks (students, faculty, staff) will have 60 minutes to bring the audience desiderata together in 15-20 minute pieces, to then be performed for the audience who will judge the best piece, according to announced criteria.  So if you’ve ever wanted to be in on a creative team, as well as a critical voice in awarding merit, here’s your chance.  It’s also a chance to support this very worthwhile theatrical endeavor.  Tickets are $20.  Doors open at 6 p.m. for seating and bar service.  6:30-7 p.m. is the time of the teams and planning; 7-8 p.m., dinner service is on; 8 p.m., the show begins.  Contact: 203.432.1566, or online at www.yalecabaret.org.

The Dirty Pond’s second issue is now up, with work from Christina O’Connor, Greg Maurer, Patricia Dickson, Ryan Cyr, Derek Leka, and yours truly (though don’t hold that against them). The Dirty Pond is New Haven’s newest literary outlet, dedicated to showcasing the talent that New Haven harbors and creates. Submit to it, support it, but most of all, read it.

In previous essays here at the New Haven Review, I’ve written about the death of letter writing and about my misty memories of flyers around downtown that proclaimed “New Haven is the Paris of the 80s.” I wondered who it was that put up those flyers, and thanked them for their efforts, and expected nothing to follow.

Yesterday I got quite shock when I received in the mail — via the U.S. Postal Service — an actual, real, hand-addressed letter from a man who tells me that he did it. He’s the “New Haven is the Paris of the 80s” guy. Somehow he found my entry here from months ago, and he wrote me a letter to thank me for it.

Made my day. Hell: made my week.

The mystery is solved, my friends. I’m not going to reveal his identity, but I want you all to know, all is well, and the world is now, in my view, a slightly better place than it was twenty-four hours ago.

“Nutrinos have mutated into a new kind of nuclear particle. They’re heating up the earth’s core.”

“It’s the biggest solar climax in recorded history.”

“Don’t you see the signs?”

“California’s going down!”

“All our scientific advances, our fancy machines! The Mayans saw this coming thousands of years ago.”

“Daddy!”

“We’re gonna need a bigger plane.”

“It’s a brave new world you’re heading for, and the young scientists are gonna be worth 200 old politicians.”

“The director of the Louvre was an enemy of humanity?!”

“Everybody out there has died in vain if we start our future with an act of cruelty.”

Some months ago, I wrote a little thing for the New Haven Review about my love for Shirley Jackson’s book Life Among the Savages. I’ve just gone back and looked at the date on the piece (which can be found here on the website) and my word, it was almost a year ago I wrote that tribute. Goodness. I’ve lost track of time in precisely the same way that Shirley Jackson lost track of her blankets.

Well, in a recent Wall Street Journal, John J. Miller wrote an article about Jackson which will get a lot more attention than anything I’d ever write about Shirley Jackson, and I wanted to thank him for writing the piece because from it I learned some really good news. The Library of America is going to publish a collection of Shirley Jackson’s work. Though I see no mention of the book on the Library of America website or on Amazon.com, the book is apparently scheduled for a June 2010 release. I for one am looking forward to it.

OBIE Award winner Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed, playing through Nov. 14 at the Yale Rep, is set in the camp of a rebel Liberian warlord in 2003.  There we meet three women: two are his ‘wives,’ which means: forced into service, sexual and otherwise, for the man they call the C.O.  The third woman, younger, has just arrived, and soon becomes #4 (the women refer to each other by number).  The absent wife, #2, we learn, has joined the rebel forces as a soldier.

The play’s plot mainly concerns what will become of #4, the youngest woman and the only one of the four able to read and write.

If this sounds grim, no doubt it is.  But the play, perhaps surprisingly, isn’t.  The four women are extremely lively company; their personalities make for considerable entertainment, and their situation creates a level of tension that never completely subsides.  Driven by dialogue more than action, Eclipsed demonstrates that interpersonal dynamics are the key to all drama, no matter where we find them.

Before the end of the first act Rita, an educated woman who is one of the “Peace Ladies” endeavoring to persuade warlords to lay down their arms and make peace, arrives, completing the cast.  Rita is also in search of a lost daughter, who may or may not be #4.

While the play can’t escape a certain didacticism, if only because the vast majority of its audience will need to be educated about the plight of Liberia, it is much to Gurira’s credit that the harshness of the situation is set very much in context.  First of all, in the tribal areas these women hail from, polygyny is not uncommon, even in the 21st century; thus the women, in their acquiescence to the situation, are not writing off their selfhood.  What they have dispensed with is having to fend for themselves in a war-torn land, ruled by men with guns, but also, as they are swift to tell #4, they are preserved from camps where women are shared among all the soldiers.  Being at the beck and call of one man is deemed both preferable and more traditional.

Indeed, Gurira establishes these women as types we might identify from tales of slavery in our own country, a fact that makes the play resonate beyond our sympathy for “those poor people over there.” #1, Helena (Stacey Sargeant) is much like the complicit “mammy” in many versions of plantation life in the south: she doesn’t really question the C. O.’s right to lord it over them and make what demands he will.  But this doesn’t make her servile so much as dependable and loyal.  She believes in a pact between herself and the C.O.

#3, Bessie (Pascale Armand) is more or less the comic relief; pregnant and somewhat vain and silly, she is also quick-witted.  Not only does she accept the harem-like conditions, she is determined to do everything to promote her standing in the pecking order. #4, known only as “The Girl” (Adepero Oduye), is the impressionable new-comer, but also, in a sense, the prize.  Will she accept her lot and bond with the mammy-like Helena, or will she seek a greater freedom and autonomy, like #2?

Gurira has said that it was a photograph of rebel women soldiers such as #2, Maima (Zainab Jah), “feminine, glamorous, intimidating, powerful, belligerent, and African,” that inspired her to learn about the conditions of their lives and write the play.  And indeed Maima, who takes the warrior name “Disgruntled,” becomes central to Act II as she tries to indoctrinate The Girl into the way of the warrior.  Tough, savvy, with no illusions, she is the voice of reality in wartime: to carry a gun means strength and autonomy, but, as becomes clear, it also means choosing to oppress rather than be oppressed.

And that is the moral dilemma of armed-insurrection that the play ultimately turns on, with The Girl as the test case.

Focused through the interactions of a group of women who must make do with a situation not of their making, the question of how to cope becomes a personal decision met by each woman individually.  And, though the women can be viewed as types, it is our strong belief in their reality, and in the personal significance of their actions, that drives the play.  One can’t help liking each of them, but for different reasons.

The cast is uniformly excellent.  Eclipsed is a true ensemble piece where no one is ever front and center with the others only offering support.  Speaking a dialect that will be foreign to most listeners, the cast deliver their lines with an emphatic poetry that charms the ears and is always intelligible.  They are so convincing in their roles, one would be stymied to hear the actresses suddenly speak in their normal accents.  The set is naturalistic, spare yet lovely. The lighting effects — including rain, early morning sun, dappled forest — very effective.

Perhaps the strongest impression the play leaves us with is not of the struggle for self-determination, but of the basically supportive and companionable aspects of human life, even in the most unpromising circumstances.  And on that front, it is perhaps #1, Helena, who emerges as the play’s key figure, for it is she who has the furthest to go to grasp the new world that comes with the end of the war.

ECLIPSED, directed by Liesl Tommy, features sets by Germán Cárdenas Alaminos, costumes by Elizabeth Barrett Groth, lighting by Marcus Doshi, sound by The Broken Chord Collective, dramaturgy by Walter Byongsok Chon, vocal and dialect coaching by Beth McGuire, and stage management by Karen Hashley

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This weekend’s New York Times had a great article about the New Haven Improvisers Collective, an awesome—and extremely welcoming—group of musicians who gather on the last Monday of every month at Neverending Books on State Street to explore the range of possibilities that improvised music has to offer. As the NYT article rightly points out, improvised music is most closely associated with jazz, but that genre doesn’t have a lock on improvisation; one of the real pleasures of playing improvised music, in fact, is to explore the ways in which musical genres can be bent, broken, combined, or, in some magic moments, superseded.

(Those with a keen eye will notice that I’m on the list of members of the collective. In the interest of full disclosure, this is because I played with the group for a few weeks in 2005 to write a story for the New Haven Advocate about the collective and their encounter with improvisational conductor Butch Morris. I haven’t been back, for a variety of reasons that will all sound like excuses now, but I’ve been wanting to return for a long time—now that I’m a better musician and almost have the right gear. I learned more about music in the weeks I spent with them and Morris than I had in a couple of years, and I’m still to this day drawing from those lessons.)

The NHIC and Firehouse 12, a terrific club and jaw-dropping studio that routinely puts on shows of non-mainstream jazz and other music that defies categorization, deserve every bit of praise that the article heaps on them. But they’re also emblematic of a larger characteristic of New Haven that I’ve found myself repeating many times over to people who ask me what it’s like to live here.

As just about everyone who’s lived in this area for longer than a year or so knows, New Haven labors under a reputation that is probably about ten years out of date. Many people outside of New Haven think of the place and imagine a city in trouble. But we know that it is not so. New Haven has its share of struggles, of course—and I do not mean to belittle those troubles at all, or perhaps even worse, aetheticize them—but it is a positive thing as much as it’s a problem. It energizes the place, makes it vital. It makes the people who live here give a damn about it. And right now, New Haven is that wonderfully unstable combination of interesting and affordable. It is ethnically and culturally rich, thanks to both the town and gown sides of things. It is economically diverse. And it’s a place where something like Firehouse 12 and the New Haven Improvisers Collective can exist without having to fight, every single minute, for survival.

The month or so before CBGB closed, you may remember, was a great time to write an article about a) the death of New York City as a vital cultural force or b) the inability of American pop culture to replicate anything like the heady heyday of the late 1970s. Obviously both of these statements dramatically overstated things. But nestled within the hyperbole is a kernel of truth: It is difficult to innovate and take chances—artistically or otherwise—when the cost of simply living is too high. God help me, I can’t find the interview, but if I remember right, a reporter asked Chris Frantz of the Talking Heads if New York could ever produce another CBGB. No, said Frantz, it was just too expensive to run a business in New York and book bands the way Hilly Kristal, its owner, did (Though Brooklyn club Barbes challenges that assertion). Then he said something really neat: The next influential club, he argued—the one that incubates the bands that go on to have a strong effect on pop music—was probably going to be in a strip mall someplace, away from a huge urban center. I saw what he was saying. I thought of The Space, nestled in an industrial park in Hamden; it helped build an audience for the Providence-based band The Low Anthem, which led to their signing to Nonesuch. And I thought of Firehouse 12, providing a home—and a gorgeous home at that—for music that has trouble finding a stage. Based on the consistent tastes of their owners, both clubs have managed to develop scenes, and audiences. They’ve created that crucial vibe whereby people will go to see a show of someone they’ve never heard of simply because they trust the club to book someone good. This speaks a lot to Steve Rodgers (of The Space) and Nick Lloyd (of Firehouse 12) as excellent club owners. But it’s also the town that they’re in, full of people who want to hear good music—and make good music—and don’t have to go broke to do it.