Tilting at Life
Everyman
By Philip Roth
Jonathan Cape
182 Pages
Philip Roth is probably the most self-obsessed author you would come across in literature. For a period of time, he wrote about nothing else but himself, a Jewish boy from New Jersey, putting himself in characters such as Zuckermann or Roth, through trials and tribulations of the human experience. The Zuckermann’s series of books – The Ghost Writer, Zuckermann Unbound, The Anatomy Lesson, The Prague Orgy, The Counterlife, The Human Stain – and then the Roth series – The Facts, Deception, The Plot Against America – all deal with the themes of being a Jew, caught in the maelstroms of love, hate, and a maleficent life in America. Most of his characters are male with a strong libido, a propensity for multiple-marital mishaps, incorrigible and aged and driven with libido for younger women, undiminished by constant afflictions of health.
Some of his earlier works have ranged from brilliant, such as The Ghost Writer (about his pilgrimage to a maestro, Saul Bellow), Portnoy’s Complaint (about a Jew lusting after a goy woman), to the claustrophobically depressing Zuckermann’s books. In the past ten years, however, he has taken a sudden turn and beaten to a different tune, to a brighter and broader range, and won almost all the literary prizes a writer could ever think to win. But his obsession has never strayed very far from desires and the bodily functions.
Roth’s favorite obsession is naturally the body: what sparks the libido and propels a man to repeated follies, in the process making a mess of his life. EVERYMAN, Roth’s latest novel whose title taken from a fifteenth century English drama about the summoning of the living to the death, has a moral somewhere that tells us the all too clear message that we never just stumble into a folly, but we unwittingly let ourselves trip into the traps of life, and then come a time in our old age the reckoning of all damages committed, by then remorse is usually much too late, and we as the readers are left with all the mess left behind, trying to make some sense out of it. Distressingly downbeat? This is by far Roth’s most uncompromising novel. The novel is packed full of characters dying or on the brink of dying of a slew of illnesses, from Peritonitis, brain cancer to fatal cardiac arrhythmia. Not your regular poolside read on a sunny day, for sure. It’s sometimes so forbiddingly morbid you want to recoil from it all, but with Roth’s mastery in language and narrative craft one is drawn into the plights of these characters. Because we hope against hope that there lies somewhere a morsel of truth, a bright ray of promise. But in this particular case, the author is adamantly unsparing. He hands us this slim book and says, Take this. This is all there is about life. The strange thing is that by the time one emerges from the novel, one feels like grabbing a beer from the freezer and guzzling it down with gusto. Because the novel makes us realize it’s great to be alive and our troubles are but trifles compared to these guys in the book, so cheers to a good life. A bad life has been examined to its microscopic details, one that is nonetheless lived to its most daring end. Which path to be taken? You wouldn’t be any wiser any way. None is freely given either. Equipped with the most caution, a man/ woman would inevitably trip and a wrong turn can mean a one-way raunchy ride to hell. Or a muddled life shed light on. So what gives? There’s really nothing to lose. The main thing then boils down to this: to have the courage not to avert your glance at the sun. So that’s probably the right state of mind to read this novel.
EVERYMAN opens with an aerial view of a burial, seen from the point of view of Everyman, thus the unnamed main character, who recently passed away after a series of heart bypass surgery. His sons, Lonny and Randy from his first marriage are there (these progenies never forgive him for leaving their mother. Randy describes his father’s attempt at painting as that of a “happy cobbler”), so are his second wife Phoebe (same bitterness for his philandering way) and her daughter Nancy (the only character in the whole novel who seems to understand him, in whom he seems to find some rays of hope (which later as you might guess falter just as well) for becoming a better person than he ever has been) and friends from his past advertising life and his brother Howie, the successful and impregnably healthy brother, admired and then envied by him for being so successful and so seemingly untouched by the kinds of trouble he had had to go through in his life. Aside from the gravedigger, a black Southerner at the end the novel, Howie is the only other character that seems to weather life’s turbulences with ease.
As the novel begins to unveil Everyman’s life, we see how he proceeds from a small Jewish boy working at his father’s watch shop to slowly turning into the “otherness,” the unrecognized being he eventually discovers he’s turned into. Ultimately his woes begin and end with his attractions to women. He left his first wife and sons to hook up with the fair-skinned Phoebe who takes good care of him and their daughter Nancy. He then leaves Phoebe for a Danish beauty, a model he runs into on a shoot. Being only in her twenties, she can’t deal with his many hospitalizations and who ultimately leaves him in the care of a hospice nurse Maureen Mrazek, who has a reputation of inspiring patients to get up from their deathbeds.
For most of the woes in his life, Everyman has this to say, when comforting Nancy who is going through a tough time being a single parent to twins, ‘ “But there’s no remaking reality,” he said softly, rubbing her back and stroking her hair and rocking her gently in his arms. “Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes. There’s no other way.” ‘ A gritty truth from one who knows just about every kind of pain. For Everyman, spirituality and any other false hopes are non sequiturs. His faith is in the body. ‘ “Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn’t stand the complete unadultness – the baby talk and the righteousness and the sheep, the avid believers. 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.” ‘ No fancy belief here, just plain straightforward faith in one’s genes as the sole determinants of the success or failure of our lives. He in fact blames his being always shortchanged in life on the bad genes he inherits from his parents. This he sees clearly in Howie, his brother, who inherits all the best his parents can give. This, I think, is Roth’s ironic twist of the Everyman’s rugged simplicity. To the end of his life, Everyman carries himself, with albeit ever diminishing confidence, but always with his head held high, his beliefs unflagging.
Even when he encounters the gravedigger, a black Southerner who looks to him “more like a school teacher than a hard laborer,” he learns the gritty facts of the grave digging. He spends a few hours watching the black gravedigger, questioning the details of digging a hole. He finds out that it takes three to four hours to make a hole, six feet deep, and then a couple of hours to make sure the bottom of the hole will be flat. It needs to be flat for the coffin to be properly laid down. There’s no cheap escape for truth here from the author. In the last pages of the book, we are left with the simple observation of Everyman, unfazed by the operation that will eventually take his life, “Nothing could extinguish the vitality of that boy whose slender little torpedo of an unscathed body (when he was young and surfing) once rode the big Atlantic waves from a hundred yards out in the wild ocean all the way in to shore. Oh the abandon of it, and the smell of the salt water and the scorching sun! Daylight, he thought, penetrating everywhere, day after summer day of that daylight blazing off a living sea, an optical treasure so vast and valuable that he could have been peering through the jeweler’s loupe …” And he discovers death just as he has feared it would be, i.e promising nothing other than oblivion. “ He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without ever knowing it. Just as he’d feared from the start.”
Thus lies the worn out life of Everyman. We could sense through his last few words – anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled – a glimpse of this man’s unfazed spirit for a rebound. At the end, he stares straight at the sun, not fearing its brightness, given the chance he would like to take another shot at it again. A small rugged truth from an eloquent writer who eschews all the obvious elegance of the arts to deliver level-headedly to the readers. One is left with a bitter taste in the mouth, wondering what to make of Everyman’s life. A fulfilled or unfilled life? Could this be Roth’s take on the life of an average man? Or more specifically that of the shenanigans of an artist’s life? Everyman has always tried his hand at painting. Although constantly encouraged by Nancy, he never sees himself making it as an artist. Howie, on the other hand, seems set on course, never veering away from the path he sets his mind on, and never once straying from his home. Compared to Everyman’s turbulent life, Howie leads a calm and prosperous and one could only guess a happy life as well. The reader is left with all these questions. Mr. Roth, however, having done his job, turns his head away, uninterestedly paring his fingernail.
