Everyman: A Novel (Hardcover)

Philip Roth has mortality on his mind. In his more recent work, which has won him more acclaim than ever before, he has largely turned his back on satire in favour of confronting death in as direct a manner as possible. The celebrated American trilogy, consisting of American Pastoral, I Married A Communist, and The Human Stain, focused on the destruction of individual lives by ideology and paranoia. In the delightfully wicked Sabbath’s Theater, Mickey Sabbath longs for death, searches for it, as he struggles to come to terms with the demise of his mistress, Drenka. In The Dying Animal, David Kepesh confronts death in the form of a past lover, still at the height of her carnal powers, being destroyed by a tumour in her breast. Now we have Roth’s new novel, Everyman, an even more straightforward meditation on illness and the end of everything.
Before this new work, Roth had dealt most poignantly with death in one of his rare nonfiction books. In the memoir, Patrimony, without question one of Roth’s strongest and most moving works, the real Philip Roth helps his father through each step of the senior Roth’s final illness. The account transforms Herman Roth into one of his son’s most admirable characters, a strong and driven patriarch facing the final chapter. And of course, we are not spared any of the grim physical details. What some readers no doubt find off-putting, if not indicative of a lurid sensibility, emerges in Patrimony more clearly than ever as an understanding of the profundity of physical experience, of the primacy of the human body, in all its messiness, sexuality, and vulnerability. By the end of his memoir, it is Roth’s increasingly intimate connection with his father’s body-in helping to dress, bathe, and comfort him, in contemplating scans of his brain, even in cleaning up his excrement-that becomes Roth’s patrimony.
If the recent political novels and last year’s dystopia, The Plot Against America, saw a retreat from this kind of intimate and intense engagement with the physical, it returns as strongly as ever in Roth’s new book, a raw, narrowly focused account of one man’s decline and death. Gone is the need to wrestle with politics and history; instead, Roth tackles the stark simplicity of one man facing what all of us must face. While the book functions as an allegory, I suspect Roth is aiming for the kind of factualness we encountered in Patrimony. The interest in physical experience is as keen in this austere work as in any of Roth’s previous books, except now, instead of being a source of virility and pride, the body is reduced to “a storehouse for manmade contraptions designed to fend off collapse.”
In Patrimony, the real Roth takes a wrong turn while en route to inform his father of the test results that show a massive tumour inside his skull. He ends up by chance in a small cemetery near the New Jersey Turnpike, where Roth’s mother is buried and where his father will soon join her. “I find that while visiting a grave one has thoughts that are more or less anybody’s thoughts,” Roth tells us.

“At a cemetery you are generally reminded of just how narrow and banal your thinking is on this subject. Oh, you can try talking to the dead if you feel that’ll help; you can begin, as I did that morning, by saying, ‘Well, Ma’ but it’s hard not to know that you might as well be conversing with the column of vertebrae hanging in the osteopath’s office. You can make them promises, catch them up on the news, ask for their understanding, their forgiveness, for their love. You can shut your eyes and remember what they were like when they were still with you. But even if you succeed and get yourself worked up enough to feel their presence, you still walk away without them.”

The stoicism of this passage sets the tone for Everyman. For Roth there can be no religious or spiritual consolation, and it is the same for his unnamed protagonist. Old age and illness cannot be rationalised into anything other than portents of oblivion. The years of good health and productivity are barely mentioned; they are cancelled out by Everyman’s ongoing struggle with heart disease. And most agonising of all, he must confront the fact that the choices he made when he was healthy and active have resulted in his being isolated and alone, just when he is most in need of support and attention.
The story is simple enough and, for readers of Roth, it’s familiar. Born into a stable Jewish immigrant family, raised in New Jersey during World War II, Everyman, before being Jewish or the child of immigrants or the son of a diamond merchant, is an American child, sure of his birthright: the freedom to be what he wants. Having no use for religion, the only rituals meaningful to him are those that celebrate the power and invulnerability of his own young body. Perhaps the closest thing to a place of worship the young Everyman has is the sea, “the stupendous sea,” where he goes in the summers with his family to picnic and sunbathe and ride “the big Atlantic waves from a hundred yards out in the wild ocean all the way in to shore.” Afterwards, “he ran home barefoot and wet and salty, remembering the mightiness of that immense sea,” intoxicated by the smell and taste of his own skin “fresh from the ocean and baked by the sun so that he was driven to the brink of biting down with his teeth to tear out a chunk of himself and savor his fleshly existence.”
But as a boy he was no less at home in the family shop, Everyman’s Jewelry Store, a business his driven, industrious father had somehow managed to open in 1933. There he helped to close the shop and mail out the catalogues, and even transport diamonds to the setters and polishers, the precious stones in his pocket as he rode the bus, while his proud father reveled in the devotion of his “reliable” son. Years later he summons his memories of the store to distract himself during the series of angioplasties performed to keep his arteries open. Under light sedation, he recalls the different brand names of watches and clocks his father had sold, reciting them to himself while the catheters and stents are put in place to keep his own unreliable clock ticking.
Inspired perhaps by seeing the Jewish diamond polishers at work, Everyman discovered a talent for doing work with his hands, for drawing and painting. He had wanted to be a serious painter, to lead the wayward life of an artist, but he was “too much the good boy,” and following his parents’ wishes, he marries, has children, and pursues a career in advertising. Is it placing too much significance on this one decision, the decision to try to be a “good boy”, to suggest that it dooms Everyman to a lonely death? Roth provides little insight to explain why his protagonist finds it impossible to make any of his three marriages work. We may as well conclude that, like the protagonist in Roth’s breakthrough novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, Everyman simply got fed up with being the good boy. As Alexander Portnoy puts it, the crucial struggle in life is to free one’s self from morality and guilt, and instead to find a way to “be bad-and to enjoy it!”
Ensconced in a second marriage, a happy union that produces a loving daughter, Everyman is seemingly content, but the young, available women are everywhere, and “what was astonishing wasn’t what happened but that it took so long to happen”: affairs with models and secretaries, reckless encounters in his office and at location photo shoots, all leading to a passionate affair with a Danish model not much older than his daughter. Of course, he is eventually caught. A Philip Roth novel is never complete without one of those long, improbable yet riveting diatribes, and it is the good second wife, Phoebe, who delivers it this time. “I should get over being dumbstruck,” she shouts, “but I cannot, I, who never doubted you, to whom it rarely occurred even to question you, and now I can never believe another word you say.”
Having made his greatest blunder, the one he will regret the most, Everyman tries to save face by marrying the Dane, leading to a short-lived final marriage. Then, despite the daily swimming and avoidance of alcohol, the heart trouble starts, and “eluding death [becomes] the central business of his life.” As illness pervades his body, Everyman isolates himself even more. After retiring, he had lived close to his daughter and grandchildren in New York, but that changes after 9-11. “I’ve got a deep-rooted fondness for survival,” he tells his daughter after the attacks. “I’m getting out of here.” He leaves Manhattan for a retirement complex in New Jersey where he tries to rediscover his artistic ambitions, to paint again, an ambition that becomes pointless to him as the need for medical intervention increases. Eventually, he even stops talking to his beloved older brother Howie, not because of any significant dispute, but because Everyman envies him his good health, Howie’s complete freedom from tests and doctors and operating rooms.
“From here on out, he would have to manage alone,” Everyman decides, putting the blackest spin possible on old age. “[L]ike any number of the elderly he was in the process of becoming less and less and would have to see his aimless days through to the end as no more than what he was-the aimless days and the uncertain nights and the impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing.”
While it is not mandatory that old age be quite so bleak and hopeless, every attempt our protagonist makes to improve things is thwarted. His painting goes nowhere; the art lessons he gives at the retirement complex are ruined by a student’s suicide; his plan to return to New York and live with Nancy is prevented by Phoebe’s own sudden illness; his attempt to pick up one of the young female joggers on the boardwalk fails. At one point, reflecting on this miserable state of affairs, angry and regretful, he strikes himself, pounding at his heart with a closed fist “like some fanatic at prayer,” barely missing his defibrillator, hitting back at that unreliable clock that had led him astray and which no one can repair.
Mercifully, just before the end Everyman receives some small degree of consolation. It comes to him during a visit to that same lonely cemetery near the turnpike. There, his stoicism finally exhausted, “the tenderness out of control,” Everyman communes with his parents’ bones, speaks to them, and, astonishingly, they reply.

“Aloud he said to them, ‘I’m seventy-one. Your boy is seventy-one.’ ‘Good. You lived,’ his mother replied, and his father said, ‘Look back and atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left.’”

The words of the bones appear to strengthen Everyman, to give him new resolve, but they don’t affect the body’s intentions, Everyman’s fickle, faulty heart. The clock stops just when Everyman has discovered a way to keep going. But we should be grateful for small mercies. In his bleakest book yet, at least Roth grants Everyman a brief moment of respite, some solace, before abandoning him to oblivion.
Michael Carbert (Books in Canada)

Starred Review. [Signature]Reviewed by Sara NelsonWhat is it about Philip Roth? He has published 27 books, almost all of which deal with the same topics—Jewishness, Americanness, sex, aging, family—and yet each is simultaneously familiar and new. His latest novel is a slim but dense volume about a sickly boy who grows up obsessed with his and everybody else's health, and eventually dies in his 70s, just as he always said he would. (I'm not giving anything away here; the story begins with the hero's funeral.) It might remind you of the old joke about the hypochondriac who ordered his tombstone to read: "I told you I was sick."And yet, despite its coy title, the book is both universal and very, very specific, and Roth watchers will not be able to stop themselves from comparing the hero to Roth himself. (In most of his books, whether written in the third person or the first, a main character is a tortured Jewish guy from Newark—like Roth.) The unnamed hero here is a thrice-married adman, a father and a philanderer, a 70-something who spends his last days lamenting his lost prowess (physical and sexual), envying his healthy and beloved older brother, and refusing to apologize for his many years of bad behavior, although he palpably regrets them. Surely some wiseacre critic will note that he is Portnoy all grown up, an amalgamation of all the womanizing, sex- and death-obsessed characters Roth has written about (and been?) throughout his career.But to obsess about the parallels between author and character is to miss the point: like all of Roth's works, even the lesser ones, this is an artful yet surprisingly readable treatise on... well, on being human and struggling and aging at the beginning of the new century. It also borrows devices from his previous works—there's a sequence about a gravedigger that's reminiscent of the glove-making passages in American Pastoral, and many observations will remind careful readers of both Patrimony and The Dying Animal—and through it all, there's that Rothian voice: pained, angry, arrogant and deeply, wryly funny. Nothing escapes him, not even his own self-seriousness. "Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work," he has his adman-turned-art-teacher opine about an annoying student. Obviously, Roth himself is a professional. (May 5)Sara Nelson is editor-in-chief of PW.
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