Everyman by Philip Roth
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Book Reviews of Everyman
Book Review: A modern moral tale?
Summary: 5 Stars
I have not read anything by Roth for many years and realise that I should have been reading all his novels. Everyman is such a tragic story that it made me weep. There are so many questions posed by the life of this rather flawed main character and the reader feels distaste and compassion for him in fairly equal measure. A great book.Book Review: Everyman - Every life!
Summary: 5 Stars
I haven't finished the book yet but by the time I read it, it gives me an idea of the death. Everybody will reach this point but differently, n the way people look at as well.
It's not only about the death but also about the memory which will be with everybody for the whole life n we'd love to recall it.
Book Review: Everyman by Philip Roth
Summary: 5 Stars
It deals with a universal theme courageously. Basically, it establishes that "Anatomy is destiny."Book Review: "The Life & Death of a Male Body"
Summary: 4 Stars
My title refers to the unnamed protagonist's indirectly expressed (through a fittingly omniscient if humanly bound narrator) thought: "Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it 'The Life and Death of a Male Body.' But after retiring he tried becoming a painter, not a writer, and so he gave that title to a series of his abstractions." (52) The fiction may be a bit too abstract, but it's meant to place our universal limits within a particular body, imperfect by nature.
The novel regresses, in reverse after his burial opens the action, back as if he imagines relating his life to "each of the women who had been waiting for him to rise out of the anesthetic in the recovery room." (15) This allows the chronology of his days to unfold, forward erratically but appropriately, as if remembered as a series of vignettes. This does distance a reader considerably from empathy with this often selfish character. But, Roth presents us with a recognizably flawed tragic hero, not a plaster saint or thwarted genius. His Everyman without a name could stand in, and does, for all of us. It may not be a perfect novel because of this verisimilitude, ironically. The uneven emotional states and the dull stretches appear more identifiably real, because Roth refuses to polish or prettify these moments of pain and loss.
The fear grows as the years progress; Millicent Kramer's fate foreshadows his own terribly and movingly. Her decision at the end of her life provides an option akin to that wondered about by Hamlet, who wondered about "the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns." This quote does not appear, but a witty aside to Hamlet does, mouthed by the bitter wife who's thrown over as the protagonist's lusts overcome his commonsense and his family's unity is shattered by his own desire and deceit. He lies that he only visited his mistress to break up with her, and that she cried "the whole four nights" (of their tryst):"That's a lot of crying for a twenty-four-year-old Dane. I don't even think Hamlet cried that much." (119-120)
The protagonist's sons do not appear in a good light. But, the book is presented, during the character's life, from his indirect point-of-view. This obliquity forces us to side with him even as we try to separate ourselves from his foibles. He gets defensive, as any of us would in telling our own side of our life's story. Roth takes this reflex and works it subtly into his novel.
The two sons resent his abandoning their mother for this Danish model, who's not even half his age of fifty. They are briefly evoked as "children who by their nature could not understand there might be more than one explanation to human behavior--children, however, with the appearance and aggression of men, and against whose undermining he could never manage to make a solid defense. They elected to make the absent father suffer, and so he did, investing them with that power." (97) It's a twist perhaps on Lear, too, a masculine alternative. Roth underplays this aspect, but one does get the sense that some of the loneliness and isolation is self-inflicted. This jars the chance that the character thinks he has to bed a twenty-something woman he flirts with on his seaside stroll; it does for me spoil the mood of the book when the man assumes that from early manhood into his fifties he could have any woman he wanted any time. You get the often romanticized wish fulfillment of many writers, not to mention we readers, projected here, which does appear sadly to be belied by the life experiences of many of us ordinary men! I guess that's why they call it fiction.
But libido declines, and the memories stubbornly persist. This is what we fear about our aging, after all. He wonders: "was the best of old age just that--the longing for the best of boyhood"? (126) The distance between him and his Newark past, the Jewish heritage of his youth and his own detachment and perhaps total rejection, bothered me. I wondered as I neared the close if this would return as a thread to be tied into the weaving of the narrative arc. In a scene that risks sentimentalizing, and perhaps hints at what's been derided as the appearance of "the Magic Negro," the character meets at his parents' gravesite a middle-aged gravedigger. Again, although unmentioned, Hamlet's ghosts flittered for me. Roth always likes to incorporate in his fiction engrossing detail of how a craft is carried out; I think of his extended take on glovemaking in one novel among his recent Zuckerman trilogy.
Here, the cemetery worker shows how we open up and then close over what the main figure thinks of as "the brutality of burial and the mouth full of dust." (166) This suffuses the later, desperate, pages of the novel with a needed softness. I welcomed the scene, identifying both with the fear of the elderly Jews mourning their loss and being targeted by muggers even in daylight, and the slow subsiding of the ground and the toppling of the headstones as the earth shifted and the visitors dwindled. It's a powerful evocation of both the inevitable forgetting of those who came before us and of the end of the Jewish presence in that little patch near the exit to Newark Airport.
It's a neighborhood Roth in his fiction often recalls, and his character here follows suit, even as the curtain prepares to fall. "But now it appeared that like any number of the elderly, he was in the process of becoming less and less and would have to see his aimless days through to the end as no more than he was--the aimless days and uncertain nights and the impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing. This is how it works out, he thought, this is what you could not know." (161) Roth attempts to enter the "undiscovered country." But even he, as you will read in the last sentences, cannot return and report beyond the poignant and appropriate ending. It's one that we all wish we could escape.
P.S. A necessary book to read, if in its honesty a painful one. As this was on the public library's new book shelf the day that my father-in-law died, and as I had been wanting to read it even as I feared a bit doing so, I took it as a sign. Still, I postponed my finishing it it yesterday as I did not want to close my eyes on its final page. I waited until the next day to conclude and write this review.
Book Review: Everyman Dies
Summary: 4 Stars
Everyman is an intimate story of death - what the main character calls "life's most disturbing intensity." It is death as a physical, medical, slow/fast-moving affliction of old age, something terribly concrete and unsuited to all the euphamistic flights of poetic fancy we use to convince ourselves that it is something noble and profound. We tell each other that death is "what makes us human," or that it's reassuringly "natural" (as if natural was necessarily good), but now that everyman is looking at it every time he looks at his face in the mirror and feels the dry weight of his own deteriorating body, it is clear that "once one has tasted life, death does not even seem natural."
The book is about the decline of the body as the unavoidable, universal human experience. There are degrees, of course; some people live to their deaths with perfect health, others spend their last days in intractable pain. But every man and woman, unless they are spared by dying suddenly and unexpectedly while still young, is confronted by the sheer felt presence of finality hovering over their minds and bones and organs.
It is also about the regrets and nostalgias that overcome the dying everyman. To me, Roth's character has a bit too many dramatic regrets to make him a convincing "everyman" - multiple affairs, children who won't speak to him, all conspiring to make his last days lonely and shut off. The terror of his experience was partly derived from circumstances having less to do with death itself than with how he had lived his life. Roth might have been even more successful in conveying the starkness of death if he had surrounded his dying person with loving friends and family. If Roth's aim was to describe death as horrible per se, he would have done better to give his character supports that could in no way reduce that horror.
Of course, it may be that his goal was actually to describe not the horror of death in general, but the horror of a death closing on a life dominated by regrets instead of joys. I came away much more aware of the reality of my own death, but also very hopeful that, if I continue to avoid doing things that I will really regret on my deathbed, it will be a less unpleasant experience for me. But the title makes me think he really was trying to get us to think more attentively about old age and dying, not just about old age and dying as experienced by someone for whom youth and health produced mostly fleeting pleasures and pained memories. Insofar as this is the case, I thought the novel made its point less convincingly than it might have.
But the descriptions of old age and of the thought processes of a man for whom the hospital has become unbearably familiar are nevertheless deeply affecting. Roth's everyman speaks of "the prospect of coming steadily to be dominated by medical thoughts to the exclusion of everything else;" of "the aimless days and the uncertain nights and the impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing;" of "the rage and despair of a joyless sick man unable to steer clear of prolonged illness's deadliest trap, the contortion of one's character;" of wondering if "the best of old age" is nothing more than "longing for the best of boyhood;" of the pressure "to prevent your mind from sabotaging you by its looking hungrily back at the superabundant past;" of the times when there is "nothing but the pain," and "pain makes you so alone;" of the "longing for the last great outburst of everything;" and of the constant awareness of "a stone, the heavy, sepulchral, stonelike weight that says, Death is just death - it's nothing more."
Roth is yet another depressing American novelist - though not as depressing as Franzen, and I think less cynical - but here he persuades you that depressing is the only way to write about death and dying. Varnishing it with false sentiments and protests about its mystery and nobility only make us less able to die well, as far as that is possible. We must see it for what it is - a time of fear and pain and nauseating anticipation - if we are to in any way deal with it for what it is. Maybe we can master our fear of death; maybe we can avoid living the sort of life that makes death even more fearful; but we cannot avoid the physical, material reality of dying itself. So perhaps the good, the "edification" that comes from reading a novel like Everyman is that it helps us confront that reality while we still have some strength to fight the mental battle it enjoins. For we will soon discover that "[o]ld age is a battle . . . if not with this, then with that. It's an unrelenting battle, and just when you're at your weakest and least able to call up your old fight."