Ron Grossman: Philip Roth's fiction about aging was too real to pass up
by Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune
May 31, 2018
3 minutes
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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
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