That depends a little on how much you grant Roth's view of the writer -his
view of detachment. Everyone who goes to a funeral attends not only as a
mourner but as something else, too, a doctor, a teacher, etc: also, as
someone who must maintain continuing relations with the living. It is not
immediately clear that the professional detachment of writers offers a
different kind of escape from these relationships'; that it makes such
different demands on them. Everyone feels the conflict between the roles
they inhabit, but Roth wants to argue that the writer feels it differently,
and that that difference has something to say about how people should live.
The reader should be interested in the view of the writer, not because they
are alike, but because they are unalike; and the reader has something to
learn from the detachment the act of reading allows him to share in. The
writer, on this understanding, is someone who has opted out, of sex as much
as anything else; his books make the case for it.
Kindliness and curiosity are at odds with each other. "Niceness",
Zuckerman writes dismissively in The Counterlife, "is even more deadly
in writers than it is in other people." Of course, there is another
case to be made: that the loving view and the true view are really the same
thing; that the stranger's eye, for all its compensating curiosity, sees
less deeply and sharply than love.
What novelists rely on as much as anything else is their instinct for what
they should write about. Perhaps the greatest validation for the line Roth
decided early in his career to take is the late flowering it has granted
him. Part of the credit must go to the absence of sentiment in his work: he
breaks out of comfortable habits of thought as restlessly as his characters
break out of their marriages. The Zuckerman sequence includes one of Roth's
best novels, I Married a Communist (1998); and the others in the series,
though less consistently good, are all of them driven by a sharp sense, both
political and personal, of what matters and what doesn't.
(Reading Roth makes one realize how rare that is in fiction; how often
novelists are seduced by the trivial.) The gently postmodern games he plays
with his narrative alter egos belong for the most part rather to the
tradition of Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld and Woody Allen than Paul Auster:
they simply allow Roth to continue to talk about his life in fictional
terms, without putting on too elaborate a fictional costume.
Roth's new book, Everyman, is more novella than novel; and though it deals
with old age -the un-Happy Hour, as it were, for all Roth's favourite themes
-he plays no autobiographical games in it. The story opens with the funeral
of its unnamed protagonist, a successful advertising executive who had
retired to condo life on the Jersey shore to take up his long-cherished
ambition of painting and teaching art. Roth uses the occasion to introduce
his cast of characters -the wives, the children, the brother, the mistresses
and nurses -and then tells the story of the man's life from the medical
point of view. It is a kind of portrait of the hero as a hospital patient:
from the hernia operation he has as a boy to the routine heart surgery that
ultimately kills him. Eventually, Roth writes, people's "personal
biographies . . . become identical with their medical biographies".
Everyman, as this description suggests, does not mark a return to the lyric
loveliness of Goodbye, Columbus; even so, the prose has a chilling utility
that sometimes seems just about as unexquisite as a reader can be expected
to stomach. "First my mother died", someone tells the protagonist,
making conversation in a hospital waiting room:
Six months later my father died, eight months after that my only sister died,
a year later my marriage broke down and my wife took everything I had. And
that's when I began to imagine someone coming to me and saying, "Now
we're going to cut off your right arm as well. Do you think you can take
that?". And so they cut off my right arm. Then later they come around
and they say, "Now we're going to cut off your left arm". Then,
when that's done, they come back one day and they say, "Do you want to
quit now? Is that enough? Or should we go ahead and start in on your legs?".
Prospero retiring from his island promises that every third thought shall be
his grave -the other two, one might suppose, to be divided equally between
the prospects of his children and the medical details of his hospital
visits. That at least is more or less the recipe Roth is following, and one
cannot help admiring again the simplicity of his narrative line. The
novella, however, does offer an occasional relief from bleakness. There are
scenes set outside the walls of hospitals, though these serve partly to
explain the consolation available to the protagonist. The great failure, for
example, of his third marriage lies in the fact that his wife -a much
younger woman, a Danish model named Merete who had been hired for one of his
advertising campaigns -isn't up to the role of comforter. "The woman is
basically an absence and not a presence", his doctor warns him,
requiring him to get professional help.
Everyman makes you feel how much the power of such comforting counts for in
life. The ability to comfort each other (not to arouse, or interest, or
amuse) is what we finally depend on.
The great regret of his life is the break-up of his second marriage, to
Phoebe, the mother of his favourite child. Their relations had become
increasingly sexless; still, she had offered him, in her own words, the
companionship of "a mature, intelligent woman" who "understands
what reciprocity is". That he resigned it for the sake of "the
little hole" at the back of a twenty-something Danish model strikes him
as particularly foolish and sets up the problem Roth has been writing about
since Goodbye, Columbus: how can we choose rightly to live when the sexual
urge overwhelms us? How can we choose to live at all without that urge? Roth
has no answer to these questions, as usual; but he seems, here as elsewhere,
to incline towards something like chastity, when a man has the discipline
for it, as the happier alternative.
Everyman is Roth's attempt to modernize The Death of Ivan Ilych. Although it
lacks the terrible grandeur of Tolstoy's story, Roth's version might be set
at a still lower temperature. Tolstoy, with a touch of sentimental warmth,
suggests that Ivan is dying because he has not asked the right question
about his life. "Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done?",
it suddenly occurs to Ivan. "But how could that be when I did
everything properly?"
This is one of Roth's favourite muddles, but the resolution to it solves less
than one might suppose. His Everyman "was too much the good boy, and,
answering to his parents' wishes rather than his own, he married, had
children, and went into advertising to make a secure living". He
escapes that life through a series of affairs and marriages, "convinced
of his right, as an average human being, to be pardoned ultimately for
whatever deprivations he may have inflicted upon his innocent children in
order not to live deranged half the time". Sticking by Phoebe might
have made the end of his life a little easier; he is wise enough to
recognize that fact. Even so, Roth forces him to acknowledge that "what
he'd learned was nothing when measured against the inevitable onslaught that
is the end of life". In the past, Roth's narrators have admitted their
personal stake in the stories while remaining themselves curiously objective
and aloof. This time his own detached omniscient presence cannot resist
getting a word in now and then, of wisdom or sympathy or both.
"Old age", goes one such interjection, "isn't a battle; old age
is a massacre" -a touching break in form from a writer who has
elsewhere taken such pleasure in watching the battles being fought. The
title of the book is drawn not only from the tradition of morality plays,
but from the name of the jewellery store, Everyman's, owned and run by the
protagonist's father. "It's a big deal for working people to buy a
diamond", he tells his sons, no matter how small. The wife can wear it
for the beauty and she can wear it for the status. And when she does, this
guy is not just a plumber -he's a man with a wife with a diamond. His wife
owns something that is imperishable. Because beyond the beauty and the
status and the value, the diamond is imperishable.
The point, of course, is that people are not; and this is where Roth's secular
faith in the virtue of questioning falls short. His Everyman has his first
inkling of death at his father's funeral. As the mourners, according to
Jewish tradition, begin to pack the grave with earth, "all at once he
saw his father's mouth as if there were no coffin, as if the dirt they were
throwing into the grave was being deposited straight down on him, filling up
his mouth". Perhaps the only weakness in Everyman is that there isn't
really, in the end, any argument to keep up -which is another way of saying
that Philip Roth has reached the limit of what he can be funny about.
