Books & Poetry

Early in his 1991 memoir, ‘Patrimony’, Philip Roth recalls an unplanned visit to the grave of his mother, in a cemetery just off the New Jersey turnpike. He was supposed to drive from Manhattan across the Hudson to Elizabeth, to see his sick father. Instead, after taking a wrong turning, he finds himself by his mother’s resting place, reflecting on the meagreness of the words he is able to summon up in her memory. ‘What cemeteries prove,’ Roth concludes, ‘is not that the dead are present but that they are gone. They are gone and, as yet, we aren’t.’

Roth’s latest novel, ‘Everyman’, is an elaboration of this unconsoled, illusionless vision. It begins in the same New Jersey cemetery, with the funeral of the unnamed protagonist – the bulk of the book is told in flashback, from a moment just before the surgery that will kill him – and ends there as well, when he comes across the man who had dug the graves of both his parents. The title is taken from a medieval morality play in which Everyman is summoned to judgement by Death and is ultimately admitted to heaven on the strength of his good works (having previously been deserted by beauty, kin and worldly goods). No such redemption awaits Roth’s Everyman, however: ‘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.’

Everyman reflects at one point that were he ever to write an autobiography, he’d call it ‘The Life and Death of a Male Body’. And that’s as good an alternative title as any for this brief but remarkable novel in which Roth fixes on matters of life and death with a concentrated intensity unmatched in his fiction since 1995’s ‘Sabbath’s Theater’. In that book, Mickey Sabbath fears impotence as much as he fears death. Though Everyman is less extravagantly priapic than Sabbath, sex for him is nevertheless a sort of howl of erotic rage against the fact of finiteness and decay (as it is for many of Roth’s protagonists).

Sabbath is also a tender memoirist of his own past, however, lovingly evoking a childhood spent on the Jersey shore.

But in ‘Everyman’, it is left to the brother, Howie, in his funeral oration, to recall how the siblings would run errands for their father, a jeweller and watchmaker in Elizabeth. For Everyman himself, personal biography is identical with medical biography and ‘eluding death seemed to have become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story’.

A hernia operation at the age of nine comes retrospectively to seem like an intimation of an adult life defined by this struggle with decrepitude.

In his mid-thirties, by which time he’s a successful art director at a New York advertising agency, Everyman suffers a burst appendix during an affair with the woman who will become the second of his three wives. Overnight, he has turned from ‘someone who was bursting with health into someone inexplicably losing his health’. Peritonitis is followed by cardiac surgery at 56 and later a bewildering series of medical interventions and the installation of heart stents and, finally, a defibrillator: ‘A defibrillator was permanently inserted as a safeguard against the new development that endangered his life and that along with the scarring at the posterior wall of his heart and his borderline ejection fraction made him a candidate for a fatal cardiac arrhythmia.’

This passage is entirely characteristic. Roth’s artistry in ‘Everyman’, and the source of the novel’s considerable power, lies in the eschewal of abstractness and an unwavering attention to the fleshy particularities of mortality. Near the end of his life, when he is living in the Starfish Beach retirement village, Everyman observes how his ageing co-residents swap surgery stories, as war veterans might compare battle scars. The observation is moving because of the acknowledgment it contains of what his own life has become.
The novel ends beside the graves of his parents, who are buried next to one another. Everyman tries to dredge up his earliest memories of them. He fails because the effort of recollection is overwhelmed by the recognition that what he is contemplating are ‘just bones, bones in a box’. Later, he comes across a gravedigger turning over the soil of a fresh plot. He gently encourages the man to explain how a grave is dug – how the sod is cut to size using a special wooden frame, what sort of shovels are used. Everyman is grateful for the explanation: ‘You couldn’t have made things more concrete… I thank you for the concreteness.’ We should be grateful to Roth too – for the concreteness.