低入尘埃 – The Humbling by Philip Roth

《低入尘埃》的主人公阿克斯勒是知名的舞台剧演员，有一天他的才华顿失，再也无法上台表演，深受困扰并想自杀的他主动住进精神病院，但出院后仍旧无法重拾演艺事业。同时，他离了婚，与好友的女儿培琴陷入热恋，这对年龄相差二十岁的伴侣为彼此的生活注入了新的活力和改变，然而女方却在他情浓之时转身离去。阿克斯勒又冒出了自杀的念头，实践这出演员在现实中只许演一次的戏。

Everything is over for Simon Axler, the protagonist of Philip Roth’s startling new book. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his 60s, he has lost his magic, his talent, and his assurance. His Falstaff and Peer Gynt and Vanya, all his great roles, “are melted into air, into thin air”. When he goes on stage he feels like a lunatic and looks like an idiot. His confidence in his powers has drained away; he imagines people laughing at him; he can no longer pretend to be someone else. “Something fundamental has vanished.” His wife has gone, his audience has left him, his agent can’t persuade him to make a comeback.

Into this shattering account of inexplicable and terrifying self-evacuation bursts a counterplot of unusual erotic desire, a consolation for the bereft life so risky and aberrant that it points not toward comfort and gratification but to a yet darker and more shocking end. In this long day’s journey into night, told with Roth’s inimitable urgency, bravura, and gravity, all the ways that we persuade ourselves of our solidity, all our life’s performances – talent, love, sex, hope, energy, reputation – are stripped off.

Following the dark meditations on mortality and endings in Everyman and Exit Ghost, and the bitterly ironic retrospective on youth and chance in Indignation, Roth has written another in his haunting group of late novels.

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