The major plot-turn shows up in the form of Pegeen Mike Stapleford, a lesbian 25 years Axler's junior and the daughter of old friends. Like Coleman Silk, the unjustly disgraced classics don in The Human Stain who emerges from despair by starting an affair with an illiterate young janitor, Axler finds a new beginning in an unlikely and ill-advised romance. It is difficult to make sense of their relationship. In his review of the book in the Observer, William Skidelsky suggests that "the novel's sexual politics could be construed as highly offensive. The fantasy underpinning Axler and Pegeen's relationship seems to be that a lesbian can be ‘turned' by a real, potent man." This is a variation of the critical approach sometimes found in Roth's own characters ("if he didn't find political and social implications in the book, the whole thing was no good"): the kind of literalism that never fails to miss the point of literature.

Axler isn't a "potent man" — the book is mainly about his forlorn attempts to reclaim his lost status as even a "real" one. Suggestions of him being able to "turn" a lesbian, and there aren't many, are irony at Axler's expense. Pegeen is the potent one, the agent. Axler is on the wrong end of an asymmetric relationship, the cruel asymmetry of need, and the fantasy underpinning it is the one that, without ever being woken from his dream-like, ghost-like state, he allows himself to nurture: that, at this late stage, things might turn out all right. In the end, it's something like the inscrutability of people, the all-too-predictable unpredictability of people that, manifested in Pegeen, completes Axler's humbling. As Zuckerman writes in American Pastoral, "You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again."

The Humbling isn't Philip Roth at his best. It lacks the usual depth and, though funny, is perhaps too tonally sparse to be really satisfying. But the "universal nightmare", the desertion of Axler by first his talent and then the girl on whom he pins false hope, is moving. So brief that it barely exceeds the short-story bracket, the novel has the feeling of an experimental sketch, but one that is worthwhile, both for the reader, and for the writer still approaching old themes from new angles.