Ludwig Van Beethoven, in his late period, produced some of the most sublime chamber music ever written. Woody Allen abandoned Russian heaviness and zeitgeist-tapping frizziness to revel in the delight of form and structure. His recent films, “Match Point” and “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”, may be slight, but the plots are well-oiled and the acting perfect.

Philip Roth, in his late period, wants his readers to know that long life is no blessing. People will still die, but not before their minds and bodies fail in all sorts of dignity-killing ways. “Old age isn’t a battle,” he wrote three years ago in “Everyman”. “Old age is a massacre.” Two books later, that statement still holds true.

This time the man felled by age and infirmity is Simon Axler, an actor who suffers a breakdown while portraying Prospero and Macbeth in repertory. His acting grows halting and stilted; he comes to dread performing; he stops eating and checks himself into a psychiatric hospital. The breakdown is equally sudden and inexplicable, and Mr Roth scores a palpable hit by showing that Axler’s sudden and unexplained recovery is fundamentally no less terrifying. To the person suffering, both events are transformative and happen for no apparent reason.

After his breakdown, Axler retreats to his country pile. His wife abandons him; his closest local friend has recently died. Into his life comes a woman named Pegeen. She is the daughter of two actors with whom he performed “Playboy of the Western World” in his youth. She is 25 years younger than Axler, and until she meets him she had been a lesbian. Naturally, they have one of those torrid sex-talk affairs in which Rothian protagonists specialise. Like Faunia Farley in “The Human Stain”, there is nothing remotely real or credible about Pegeen. She seems a rather creepy, jejune and adolescent fantasy.

... contd.