Everyman
By Philip Roth


Sequestering himself in his writing studio and sticking to a strict regime of diet, exercise and work, Philip Roth has regularly turned out award winning literature. In 1997 he won the Pulitzer Prize for the novel American Pastoral. In 1998, he received the National Medal of Arts and Letters at the White House. In 2002 he was given the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal. Roth has won the National Book Award, the PEN/ Faulkner Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice. In 2004 he published a disturbing, yet reflective novel of revisionist history, The Plot Against America for which he was given the Society of American Historians’ prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004”. The Plot Against America was named a Best Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book World, Time, Newsweek and many other periodicals.
Roth’s latest addition to his impressive body of work is the short, but artistically accomplished novel, Everyman. Available sometime in May, Everyman is published by Houghton Mifflin Company 2006 at $24.00. It is Roth’s 27th book and the fifth book he has written in the 21 century. Everyman, a novel about aging and death originated when Roth attended his friend and fellow writer, Saul Bellow’s funeral and is a response to Bellow’s last book, Ravelstein. At 73 years old Roth understands all too well the deterioration of the body caused by aging. Because of back problems Roth writes while standing at a lectern. He tries to stay in peak physical condition to maintain the long hours that are demanded by his work.
Roth begins his novel at his nameless main character Everyman’s funeral. A circle of friends, family and colleagues gather around to pay their final respects or celebrate his death. Roth writes, “Of course, when anyone dies, though many were grief-stricken, others remained unperturbed, or found themselves relieved, or, for reasons good or bad, were genuinely pleased.” Roth cleverly crafted this subtle expositional funeral scene where we are introduced to the Everyman character through the feelings, thoughts and eyes of those who knew him best. Then effortlessly, Roth slides the reader into a type of vignette segue of the Everyman’s thoughts right before he passes on, and with more sneaky expositional material that is vital to the story, Roth flashbacks to the Everyman’s youthful experiences with death. The first time, he stumbles across a body that has washed up on a beach, and the second, while he’s in the hospital waiting for a hernia operation a boy in the hospital bed next to him dies. Roth writes, “Looking across at the other bed, he saw that it was stripped of its bedding. Noting could have been clearer to him what had happened than the sight of the bare mattress ticking and the uncovered pillows piled in the middle of the empty bed…Memorable enough that he was in the hospital that young, but even more memorable that he had registered a death.”
The novel progresses chronologically from that point. We follow Everyman through occupational successes, marriage, children, accolades, triumphs, deaths, sadness, sickness, mistresses and infidelities, divorce, another marriage and another child. John Lennon said that life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. Meanwhile, Roth shows us that mortality is in the wings, like light breath upon the neck and shoulders, needling whispers of pain and doubt slowly chip away pieces of being. At the same time these inklings are creating a false sense of comfort and inspiring thoughts of living forever. Two completely different, contradictory themes can occupy the same mind at the same time, forming a paradox where experiences stored in short term memory and long term memory are nullified. The aliveness and deadness are forgotten because humanity is too stupefied and too busy just trying to exist day by day in a fugue. Everyman’s daughter Nancy repeats to him his life’s maxim, ““There’s no remaking reality,”” she told him. ““Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes.”” As a comfort zone is reached within existence mortality releases its full wrath upon Everyman, and as such, that which is life is over.
Some readers maybe tempted to think that the Everyman is an aged Alexander Portnoy, from Roth’s 1969 novel, Portnoy’s Complaint or even Philip Roth himself. This isn’t so. Roth took the title Everyman from the 15 century medieval morality play of the same name that dramatizes the moral melee of a Christian individual’s path to redemption. The character Death summons the Everyman to inform him that his life has reached its end. Everyman seeks the companionship from those around him to accompany him on his final journey, of course, his false friends: his casual companions, his kin, and his wealth refuse to go with him. So he relies upon himself, his Good Deeds, his Strength, his Beauty, his Intelligence, and his Knowledge. These allow him to pay-off his accountability, but only his Good deeds follow him into the afterlife.
Roth applies the idea of accountability from the Everyman morality play to his Everyman character. Using the Everyman morality play as an example each character in Roth’s novel, Everyman’s brother Howie, Everyman’s two sons, Randy and Lonny, his daughter Nancy, his parents and his three ex-wives serves a dual purpose besides interacting with the Everyman, they’re also symbolic. Everyman’s occupation, dream of becoming an artist, his mistresses, friends, wealth and business achievements Roth shows are all finite like the characters in the Everyman morality play when the reaper comes calling. Everyman loses the strength of his body, his mind is helpless and useless, beauty is a distraction but insignificant and his talent as an artist can not save him. But then, Roth departs from the Everyman morality play. Roth’s accountability for his Everyman is not in a Christian sense of good versus evil, right or wrong, nor uses the idea of heaven as an incentive to seek redemption. God and religion do not figurer into the Everyman’s equation. Roth writes, “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. If he could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself, that was it--he’d come upon it early and intuitively and however elemental, that was the whole of it.”
Roth’s Everyman’s accountability is the outcome of exercising free-will. Does he take responsibility for his actions? Roth doesn’t judge, accuse or try to make an ethical example of his Everyman. Neither does he allow rationalization to become Everyman’s ‘get-out-of-jail-free-card’. After his first infidelity and becoming estranged from his two sons, Everyman continues to give into the urges of his body and repeats his cycle of marriages, mistresses and divorces. He no longer apologizes or gives explanations to anyone, including his adult sons. Roth writes, “Randy and Lonny were the source of his deepest guilt, but he could not explain his behavior to them…It was inexplicable to him-the excitement they could seriously persist in deriving from his denunciation…was their steadfast posture of unforgivingness any more forgivable? Or any less harmful in its effect? He was one of the millions of American men who were party to divorce that broke up a family…nor could they ever understand that he had lost the same family they did.”
Everyman is not for everyone. Philip Roth is a keen observer of reality and even keener at reducing humanity down to its essence, physicality without the governor of intellect, or fear of damning an immortal soul. Roth writes about the human animal. Some might take umbrage or even a moral outrage at his representations. Everyman is brutally honest, ‘there’s no remaking reality we live, and we take it as it comes, we hold our ground and take it as it comes.’ And we die.



Lee Gooden 4-25-2006