Simon Axler is a successful stage actor in his sixties who has discovered that he can no longer act. "He'd lost his magic," the book begins. "He was asked to play Prospero and Macbeth at the Kennedy Center — it was hard to think of a more ambitious double bill — and he failed appallingly in both, but especially as Macbeth." At first, he thought the feeling would pass: "It didn't pass. He couldn't act." 

Then, like Murray Ringold in I Married a Communist, who, "asphyxiated inside Shakespeare", contemplates his brother Ira's fate with a line from Twelfth Night stuck in his head, Axler is tortured by Prospero's words:

They repeated themselves so regularly in his head that they soon became a hubbub of sounds torturously empty of meaning and pointing at no reality yet carrying the force of a spell full of personal significance. "Our revels now are ended. These our actors, / As I foretold you, were all spirits and /Are melted into air, into thin air." He could do nothing to blot out "thin air", the two syllables that were chaotically repeated while he lay powerless in bed...

Axler has "been disarmed of the weight and substance of his professional existence one night while he slept". Like Shakespeare's words to him, like the thin air, he becomes "empty of meaning". Some readers will make the jump from character to author and feel as if Roth has himself lost some of his magic, the ability to inject characters with life. But the point of Axler is that he is a shell. All that was inside has disappeared.

Feeling suicidal, he checks himself into a psychiatric hospital, where he's told that he — his life — is not just a dream, but a very common dream, "a universal nightmare", in fact. Being on stage unable to perform is like "walking down a busy city street naked or being unprepared for a crucial exam..." He starts to feel better — no thanks to the various "empty exercises" he is put through — but the idea that "nothing that was happening to him seemed to have to do with anything else" continues to frighten him. There is a quite brilliant absurd comedy to the scenes in the psychiatric ward, as this ghost of a man trudges around, trying, and failing, to say meaningful things, and the story continues in this vein when Axler, back at home, is paid a visit by his agent. In the course of an obscenely long and hopeless conversation, he tries to soothe Axler's insecurity ("So you couldn't do Macbeth to your satisfaction. Well, you're not the first...He's a murderer, he's a killer. Everything is magnified in that play.") and tempt him back to the stage. Roth has not lost his famous ear for speech: 

You should come down to New York and begin to work in his studio with Vincent Daniels. You won't be the first whose confidence he's restored. Look, you've done all that tough stuff, Shakespeare, the classics — there's no way this can happen to you with your biography.

The redundant "begin to", the reference to "his studio" ridiculously preceding the name of the studio's owner who hasn't yet been mentioned, the second sentence turned on its head to accommodate the "you won't be the first" formulation, that use of "biography" — this perfect old New York agent-speak wonderfully complements the atmosphere of the scene. After 12 pages, Axler says: "Jerry, I can't go on with this conversation. We could talk all day, and to no avail", before continuing down a blind alley for another couple of pages.