The Humbling by Philip Roth; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 160 pages ($22).

A true story of an almost empty encounter with Philip Roth: I passed him on Fifth Avenue once on a chilly fall day in Manhattan. He was wearing an expensively tailored camel’s hair coat and blue cashmere scarf. He looked like an actor. And as we passed each other, my eyes must have widened in recognition. He smiled the kindly “Yes, that’s me” smile you see on actors when you pass them on the street (I saw an identical smile years ago on the face of Lily Tomlin in an off-Broadway theater when a couple of us recognized her two rows behind us.)

Roth carried himself as much like an actor as a world-renowned American author who would continually have a Nobel bypass every autumn. Here is the magnificent beginning of the slender new masterwork of his gerontological bloom about 60s-ish actor Simon Axler: “He’d lost his magic. The impulse was spent. He’d never failed in the theater, everything he had done had been strong and successful and then the terrible thing happened: he couldn’t act. Going onstage became agony. Instead of the certainty he was going to be wonderful, he knew he was going to fail. It happened three times in a row, and by the last time nobody was interested, nobody came. He couldn’t even get over to the audience. His talent was dead.”

He’s not even sure that his ensuing despair is real. That too could be fake. All that was solid has melted into air. And then—this being Philip Roth’s 30th book— after voluntary hospitalization comes a polymorphously active affair with Pegeen, a “reformed” lesbian. A tragic Chekhovian ending beckons.

At this stage, it is impossible to gauge new Roth by size alone. A 160-page book—this one say— could be major and exceptional. A book three times the size might not. Despite some ill repute, this one definitely is.

—Jeff Simon