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Philip Roth, in his mid-70s now, is publishing a book a year. Yes, they are short – the newest, The Humbling, is 140 small pages with generous spacing – but it still means a book a year. Roth has apparently already delivered next year's release.

While it is probably impossible for Roth to write an uninteresting novel at this stage, it is equally impossible (probably) for any artist that prolific not to have ebbs and flows in the intensity and verve of his work. After a run of very strong fictions, The Humbling feels a bit like the concept of a novel (or novella), notes toward it, rather than the honed and fully inhabited work.

The Humbling, by Philip Roth, Hamish Hamilton Canada, 140 pages, $30

It is possible to see the book as another of Roth's explorations of the indignities of old age, themes explored in Exit Ghost and Everyman in the past few years. On the other hand, the protagonist this time, Simon Axler, is a well-known actor only 65 years of age. That's not especially geriatric, and indeed there's a short scene where Axler's agent, over 80, tries to cajole him out of depression and self-doubt – and the agent is feisty and smart and on his game. It feels too simple to read this one as about age, as such.

Axler's problem is that he has lost his mojo onstage. The one-time lion of the theatre can't speak lines effectively, or move or listen properly. A recent performance as Macbeth was greeted with derision. The actor retires to his New England farmhouse to brood. He broods so deeply his wife abandons him. He considers suicide, admits himself to a mental-health clinic. He is discharged after a month, though not without a somewhat over-determined encounter with another suicidal patient, who tells him of discovering her second husband abusing her eight-year-old daughter, and her shame at not properly intervening, even to the point of killing the man. In a work of this size and form, it feels obvious this woman and her story will not be a throwaway encounter, and this proves to be the case.

“ The reader feels hustled toward a desired resolution ”

Once back at his farmhouse alone, Axler endures his agent's visit, resists entreaties to get his act together (as it were), and appears headed for a solitary, perhaps suicidal fate. This is interrupted by the arrival of a Roth staple: a younger woman, attractive.

Pegeen Stapleford, 40, the lesbian daughter of old friends of Axler's, drops by. She has just begun teaching at a nearby college. A relationship out west has ended badly, she has had a fling with the female dean of the college where she now teaches – there is a suggestion that she might have used this to get the position. In (very) short order, Pegeen and Axler are lovers – her first male partner since university – and she enters and revives his life.

He does, in certain ways, the same for hers, though mainly by buying her fashionable clothes, changing her butch hairstyle, giving her space in his home for herself. He might also be making her happy; he certainly seems to be. Her parents, his one-time friends, are not pleased when they learn of the liaison, and Axler is given a few internal passages as to how inappropriate he finds this response, given that Pegeen is hardly a child.

Roth lets the reader see his protagonist carefully not letting his younger lover see how he feels. Axler is already guarding the relationship. It already matters. And because of this, the reader senses the slow (or even swift) trundling forward of possible disaster. This is adroit use of the narrative framework.

Less adroit, perhaps, is an eight-page unbroken recitative by Pegeen of a lunchtime conversation with her mother on a visit in New York, a full plate of “I said, then she said, then I said, and so then she said …” Those who have come to admire and trust a writer often end up searching for (and sometimes finding) reasons why an adept stylist might work in this flat vein of reportage. It is even possible to decide that, given a protagonist wrestling with the vanishing of his craft, Roth might be offering deliberately craft-limited passages to underscore the feeling or process. It is possible, but unlikely. The more so when, not long after, in the opening sentences of part three of a three-part work, another of Roth's trademark craft elements shows up: seriously aggressive (and aggressively written) sexual scenes.

This is not new ground for Roth: He knows how to startle and work the reader with expeditions into explicit sexuality, and there's verve and even a kind of humour here (depending on how you feel about green dildos). What there isn't, is any strong sense of preparedness. This may be because Roth wanted to surprise more than he wanted to lay groundwork.

But unless one is to have construed earlier from the sheer fact of Pegeen's lesbianism, or the brief affair with her infatuated dean, that she's a dangerous lover, this part of the book feels grafted on rather than organically linked to the pages that precede. The reader feels hustled toward a desired resolution. It is a short book, and the ending comes quickly.

There is matter to admire in The Humbling, and more than a little to think about, but there is also a sense that this material has been covered before by Roth with greater force and subtlety. The book is of interest to those tracking the palette and preoccupations of the man who may be the United States' finest living writer. It is not, however, a good starting place for encountering his art, nor for deepening a response to it.

Guy Gavriel Kay's next novel, Under Heaven, will be published in April, 2010.