Ron Grossman: Philip Roth's fiction about aging was too real to pass up

You can't say Philip Roth didn't warn us that the end was near. He harbored much of his final literary energy for novels with a common theme: growing old sucks.

"The Humbling" is about a 60ish actor. "He'd lost his magic," is the first sentence. The final page is his suicide note: "The fact is, Konstantin Gavrilovich has shot himself." It's a line from Anton Chekhov's play, "The Seagull."

One novel later, Roth quit writing - eight years