Everything is over for Simon Axler. One of the leading American stage actors of his generation, now in his sixties, he has lost his magic, his talent and his assurance. When he goes on stage he feels like a lunatic and looks like an idiot. His wife has gone, his audience has left him, his agent can't persuade him to make a comeback. In this long day's journey into night, told with Roth's inimitable urgency, bravura and gravity, all our life's performances u talent, love, sex, hope, energy, reputation u are stripped bare. Following the dark meditations on mortality and endings in Everyman and Exit Ghost, and the bitterly ironic retrospect on youth and chance in Indignation, Roth has written another in his haunting group of late novels. object width="480" height="303"param name="movie" value="//www.youtube.com/v/B6uL8SUYqeY?fs=1andamp;hl=en_GBandamp;rel=0"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramparam name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"/paramembed src="//www.youtube.com/v/B6uL8SUYqeY?fs=1andamp;hl=en_GBandamp;rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="480" height="303" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"/embed/object
Industry Reviews
A literary colossus, whose ability to inspire, astonish and enrage his readers is undiminished' * Washington Post *
There is a clarity, almost a ruthlessness, to his work, which makes the experience of reading any of his books a bracing, wild ride... He is the last of the giants * The Times *
Roth...knows no limits, which is part of the fun of reading him * New Stateman *
While the other big beasts of his literary generation lost it one by one, Roth has enjoyed a flowering of late form barely seen since Yeats. * Literary Review *
Roth is no longer a novelist of comic exuberance, but of thoughtful meditation about life and increasingly death; he is our surviving laureate of lateness. His new work will not detain you long, but it will linger * Telegraph *