“There was a time when intelligent people used literature to think,” wrote Amy Bellette in a letter in Philip Roth’s 2007 novel Exit Ghost. “That time is coming to an end.” How enthusiastically Roth himself endorsed this position was not entirely unambiguous – Bellette, an elderly woman whose mental processes had been ravaged by a brain tumour, might in any case have been acting as the mouthpiece of a long-dead writer – but he put the words out there, folding them into a larger argument about the ethics and intellectual purpose of literary biography and the perils of mistaking gossip for criticism. There was, undoubtedly, an element of challenge – an instruction to readers to think, to be “alone with the books, to make of them what they would on their own”. Given that Exit Ghost, alongside Everyman and now The Humbling, is part of a suite of late novels that derive their momentum and urgency from the prospect of decay and the ebbing of personal power, it is no surprise that Roth should make a case for reading with a minimum of background chatter. He has something to say, and he wishes to say it.