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Notes from 21 South Street: Approaching the Inevitable: A Review of Philip Roth's Everyman
Death used to be a character who knocked on your door and bellowed out your name. In the 15 th century play, “The Summoning of Everyman,” the doomed learn their destiny from an articulate man in an inky robe. But now, all we have to announce our fate are the monotone beeps of a heart monitor. Philip Roth's modernization of the allegorical play, his new novel Everyman, takes place in the atheistic age of science. There is no heaven or hell. Only dirt. Everyman, like many of Roth's main characters, lives a life marred by failed relationships—he slips in and out of several marriages, several funerals, and his nineteen-year-old secretary more than several times. Only now, in Roth's twenty-seventh novel, the unnamed protagonist slips into hospital gowns and slides under the knife too. I'm not ruining anything when I tell you that he dies. The book opens with his funeral. After rewinding to Everyman's first hospitalization, his hernia operation at age nine, the book fastforwards through his life playing select scenes of medical threat—his burst appendix (34), cardiac surgery (56), spattering of angioplasties, insertion of a heart stent, a defibrillator—stopping occasionally only to catch a clip of an affair or a divorce, or, maybe, an uneventful day at the office. Everyman is so generically Rothian, he seems unfinished – like a Ken doll that fell off the conveyor belt before receiving his new clothes. The son of a working-class Jersey Jew, Everyman is a superficially self-assured, centrally self-involved male, often driven by lust and riddled with frustration. When caught having an affair, his second wife divorces him, and all he can say to comfort his thirteen-year-old daughter, while rocking her back and forth, is, “‘Just take it as it comes.'” (78-79). He has all the character flaws of Roth's characters, with none of the particular quirks—he is neither an anti-Zionist alter-ego like Zuckerman, nor an anthropomorphized breast. He is simply a successful New Yorker in advertising who retires to the Jersey shore after 9/11. His defining anxiety is his “deep-rooted fondness for survival” (66) and lifelong fear of death. And to top it off, like most Americans, life is a battle between him and his clogged arteries. The other characters make only intermittent appearances and seem to be specters from Roth's other books. There is the matronly Maureen, a reincarnate of the sexually bold Drenka from Sabbath's Theater. “When, with a smile, [Maureen] let the dirt slip slowly across her curled palm and out the side of her hand onto the coffin the gesture looked like the prelude to a carnal act.” (14). Both women reinvigorate the protagonists, transmitting vitality through the electrifying orgasms they induce. It seems the only difference between the two is that since Maureen doubles as a nurse, she gets paid. We also see Roth's avatar of the more conventional male fantasy, an updated version of “The Monkey” from Portnoy's Complaint, in Merete, the 24-year-old Dutch model who inexplicably wants the fifty-year-old Jersey Jew. “For the first two days he was always diddling around her ass with his fingers while she went down on him, until finally she looked up and said, ‘if you like that little hole, why don't you use it?'” (111). Merete is just another of Roth's female characters who “is more an absence than a presence” — in essence, little more than a little hole. And yet the hole brandishes the “raw supremacy of her creatureliness over his instinct for survival” (112) like candy over a baby. It totally overcomes him — sucks him in and pulls his life apart. Roth hasn't given up writing about sex as he's gotten older. He's just infused it with a bit of morbidity. No longer simply the erotic consummation of lust, sex becomes an existential means of staving off death. In his old age, Everyman's erections are accompanied by a rush of “that sharp sense of individualization that marks a fresh sexual encounter or love affair and that is the opposite of the deadening depersonalization of serious illness” (134). Sex has always figured largely into the lives of Roth's characters. Now, however, more than just a reason to live, it becomes the essence of life itself. But the essence of death is what this book is really about. Roth makes the reader genuinely feel for an average character (Dutch model affair aside) by stoically focusing on the corporeality of fatality and the ominous nothingness to follow. In an Orthodox Jewish burial, Everyman despairingly watches “his father's disappearance from the world inch by inch” as his brother heaves shovelful after shovelful of dirt onto the casket. Later, in his climactic visit to a graveyard, Everyman questions a gravedigger for some time about the logistics of burial and learns that the bottom of the six-foot hole has to be “flat enough to lay a bed on,” and that the best way to make it so is by laying down a plank of plywood. When leaving, Everyman thanks the gravedigger saying, “You couldn't have made things more concrete” (180). From angioplasty to anesthesia to the soil, Roth gets to the dirt of dying. The closer Everyman comes to death, the more strongly it colors his vision. In the end, even Everyman's relationship to his beloved older brother Howie becomes strained. Howie, a reservoir for every positive character trait — a vivacious, straight-A, athletic, millionaire whom Everyman loves more than anything — has good health and as a result, Everyman can't help but envy him for it. “Suddenly [Everyman] could not stand his brother in the primitive, instinctual way that his sons could not stand him” (101). Despite Howie's flatness, the intensity of begrudging emotion he inspires in Everyman is not flat. Fans of Roth — self-hating Jews and self-hating women alike — can't help but feel intensely for the protagonist. We sympathize with his hostility because it is such a transparent manifestation of his vulnerability. We forgive his lust because we know he doesn't have a lot of time in which to be forgiven. When Everyman desperately makes a pass at the thirty-year-old he's been eying jogging past his retirement home, we clench our fists and cross our fingers. In spite of everything, we want him to get the girl. “He did his best to conceal his anxiety—and the urge to touch—and the craving for just one such body—and the futility of it all—and his insignificance.” The woman stuffs his number between her breasts and never calls. For Everyman, it's all over. But, it was always all over. From the opening pages of the protagonist's funeral, we read with the end in sight. We read just the way the unnamed protagonist lives — haunted by futility and fatal inevitability. But that doesn't make the subject any less chilling, or Roth's book any less poignant. Everyman lacks the complexity of some of Roth's best novels, yet its predictability is the point. Its universality is what makes it specific to everyone. After being steeped in Everyman's consciousness for a little over a hundred and fifty pages, you become him, and rereading the opening sequence becomes almost as heart-wrenchingly gratifying as spying on your own funeral. Your older brother reminisces about your childhood, and says you should have lived longer. Your daughter looks like “a ten-year-old overwhelmed,” and your ex wife sobs. “That was the end. No special point had been made.” (14).
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