EVERYMAN
by Philip Roth Cape £10 pp 182
It’s probably as well to have a full health check before starting this novel. Some of its pages will make even readers in the pink of condition blench. Guaranteed to send palpitations through the most robust of constitutions, it faces up to literature’s oldest and most enduring theme: death.
Scary scenarios have dominated Philip Roth’s fiction for some time now. American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998) and The Human Stain (2000) each showed an outstanding man destroyed by the worst aspects of his era and female perfidiousness. The Plot Against America (2004), his tour-de-force exercise in alternative history, alarmingly envisaged what might have occured had America turned fascist in the 1930s.
Quivering through all those books (especially the post-9/11 The Plot Against America) was the shock of losing a sense of security.
Everyman clenches this dread into a masterpiece of concentrated starkness. This time, the central figure — an unnamed commercial artist who has worked for a New York advertising agency — isn’t exceptional, just someone who “never thought of himself as anything more than an average human being”. He is shaken by none of the social or political upheavals that convulsed the preceding books. Although glimpses of his flaky third wife (a voracious model whose reaction to her husband’s emergency hospitalisation is to wail, “What about me?”) remind you of Roth’s sensitivity to female treachery, the main women in this story are notably sympathetic and supportive. As in Roth’s 2001 novella, The Dying Animal, the deadly antagonist is fatal illness. That book took its title from a poem by WB Yeats. This one harks further back to pay literary homage. Roth’s model for his spare, unsparing portrayal of “our species’ least favourite activity” is the 15th- century morality — and mortality — play Everyman. There, terse scenes accompany a man from the announcement of his imminent death to the moment when he sinks into the grave. Roth’s taut novel likewise ends with its protagonist’s death, but begins at his funeral. Sounding the keynote from the start, the words “grave” and “cemetery” toll out from the opening sentence. Grouped around the gaping hole into which his coffin has just been lowered, members of the deceased’s family exchange recollections of him.
Picking up the narrative thread himself, Roth then spools you back into the man’s life. Pages glowing with the warmth, nostalgia and affectionate respect that nowadays suffuse his re-creations of 1940s Jewish-American communities, like the one in which he grew up, introduce his Everyman as a bright nine-year-old preparing to spend a night in hospital prior to a hernia operation.
The world around him as he settles down with his trove of books from the local library — Kim, Treasure Island, The Swiss Family Robinson — buzzes with optimism and decent endeavour. His hard-working, loving parents are calmly reassuring. Like them, the hospital staff are “well-spoken and mannerly”. The surgeon who is to perform the operation, a fellow-Jew risen from a slum background by drive and intelligence, is as genial as he is estimable.
Despite all this, though, mortal qualms unsettle the youngster. The other bed in his room is mutely occupied by what he suspects is a dying boy. Whispered commotion behind screens around that bed during the night and a vacant, stripped mattress the next morning confirm his fears. In these surroundings the memory of a corpse (the bloated body of a seaman from a ship torpedoed by a U-boat) washed up on an Atlantic beach where he was holidaying the previous summer keeps frighteningly surfacing.
Intimations of death’s ever-present proximity to life recur more and more pressingly as Roth goes on to recount, with the concision and precision of a veteran novelist on peak form, his Everyman’s subsequent career: professional triumphs, marital satisfactions and mishaps, problems as a parent and, latterly, secret resentment of his sunny-dispositioned older brother whose vigorous well-being so contrasts with the failing health he himself is dragged down by as he moves through his sixties and into his seventies.
In this finely economic tale, motifs are put in place with the same unfussy, expert exactness that the jeweller-father of Roth’s Everyman brings to his watch- repair work in the New Jersey shop he kept going even through the darkest days of the Depression. The time-pieces there chime in with the book’s alertness to the inexorable tickings-away of life. The small diamonds glinting from the engagement and wedding rings that are the store’s stock in trade display a precious durability humanity sadly lacks.
Roth’s characters have never been strangers to physical wear and tear. Over the years, his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, has been afflicted by a cripplingly bad back, heart disease requiring a quintuple bypass, a botched operation on a bad knee that made him dependent on medication causing paranoia and hallucinations, and prostate cancer that left him incontinent and impotent. This tally of bodily calamities has been paralleled by bulletins of social decay — especially the breaking down of neighbourhoods once havens of civic co-operation and industriousness into hell-ghettoes of drugs, violence and wreckage. Symptomatically, the cemetery full of headstones carved with Hebrew scripture in which Roth’s Everyman is interred (once a dignified and tranquil resting place founded in the 19th century by his grandfather and fellow new-arrivals in America) is now vandalised, ruinous and prowled by muggers.
Personal degeneration is the book’s main concern, though. As strokes and cancer, cardiac attacks and clogged arteries drastically thin the ranks of those around him and sharpen his loneliness, we see Roth’s Everyman confronting near-death from a burst appendix in middle age, then coping with heftily invasive surgery in his later years — until his body, packed with a bulging defibrillator to protect his heart and “stents” to keep his arteries open, resembles “a storehouse for man-made contraptions designed to fend off collapse”.
In the medieval play, Knowledge is Everyman’s most steadfast ally among the allegorical figures guiding him to the grave. Knowledge plays a sustaining role in Roth’s book, too. His Everyman is stoically consoled not long before he dies by the matter-of-fact actuality with which an ageing gravedigger talks to him about death and burial.
Similarly clean of morbidity, Roth’s novel is unshrinkingly clear-sighted about the terminal scenes it surveys: a retirement village, doctors’ waiting-rooms, hospital wards, operating theatres, graveyards. A writer always fascinated by the interaction of opposites — Jews and Gentiles, orthodox and secular, America and Europe, domestic dutifulness and artistic licence, fiction and fact — he here focuses on the most fundamental contrast of all: life and death.
Juxtaposition of another kind gives the book, alive with literary brilliance for all its deathly subject matter, its remarkable quality. The unfailing verve of Roth’s prose, the effortless-seeming animation with which he peoples his pages and the intellectual and imaginative acuteness with which he measures up to “the adversary that is illness and the calamity waiting in the wings” ensure that his memento mori — angry, yearning, grieving, full of undiminished relish for the sensuous pleasures extinction will quench — pulses with persisting vitality.
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