Roth, Philip - Everyman

There is a scene at the end of “Everyman” - the fifteenth century morality play about the summoning of the living to final judgment - in which Beauty, Five-wits, Strength, and Discretion (and earlier, family, friends, and worldly possessions) forsake the eponymous hero and Everyman must descend into the grave with Good-Deeds as his only traveling companion. “Young and old” should take note, a narrator warns, because

[After] death amends may no man make,
For then mercy and pity do him forsake.
If his reckoning be not clear when he do come,
God will say - ite maledicti in ignem aeternum.

Philip Roth’s new novel, also entitled Everyman, is itself a powerful reckoning, an extended meditation on brokenness and mortality, on the body and the soil and lost opportunities. Even if it deserves to be placed among Roth’s “minor” works - and it does, and not just because of the book’s slight 182 pages and oversized font - Everyman is still the product of a world class novelist at the height of his literary powers. Gone are the clunky allegories of the medieval play, as well as its didacticism and its Catholicism. Roth writes instead with a subtle vitality that runs counter to the themes of the book and belies the author’s own advanced years (he is well into his eighth decade).

The novel’s protagonist, whose name we never learn, grows up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where his father is a jeweler. The boy develops an early interest in painting. After serving in the Navy just after the Korean War, the man goes into advertising, eventually rising to the position of artistic director. He marries three times, has a few affairs, and sires three children - only one of whom will have anything to do with him in later years.

These elements - childhood, work, marriage, sex, and family - are the landscapes of the modern novelist. But not here. For Roth’s everyman, death and illness are the milestones of life. Nearly every passage deals with the incremental or final collapse of the human body. “Old age isn’t a battle,” the man concludes. “Old age is a massacre.”

And rather than turning to thoughts of the afterlife, the man’s perspective remains stubbornly earth-bound. He grew up Jewish but “stopped taking Judaism seriously at thirteen - the Sunday after the Saturday of his bar mitzvah.”

“No hocus-pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If [the man] could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself that was it - he’d come up on it early and intuitively, and however elemental, that was the whole of it. Should he ever write an autobiography, he’d call it The Life and Death of a Male Body.”

At times Everyman reads like a medical history form. The hospitalizations are dealt with in detail - tonsils removed, hernia, burst appendix, bypass, angioplasties, endarterectomy, stents, a permanent defibrillator, and much more - while twenty-two years of relatively good health are dispensed with in a paragraph.

Yet the book also reads like a sort of ghost story. The “deliberate independence” cultivated by the man for so long comes back to haunt him. Near the end of the book, the man has a harrowing dream in which he is calling out for the “cast of kin on whom he could not gain no matter how hard he pursued them.”

“Momma, Poppa, Howie, Phoebe, Nancy, Randy, Lonny - if only I’d known how to do it! Can’t you hear me? I’m leaving! It’s over and I’m leaving you all behind!” And those vanishing as fast from him as he from them turned just their heads to cry out in turn, and all too meaningfully, “Too late!”

In Roth’s thriller, the torment lies in the deeds that are not done - and past a certain unpredictable but inevitable point, can never be done.