Everyman by Philip Roth
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Book Reviews of Everyman
Book Review: He's been everywhere except the grave
Summary: 4 Stars
The finest line in this book is a quotation from the protagonist's father as expressed by the protagonist (paraphrased) "you should give when your hands are still warm". The second best line I caught on was "you gotta do what you gotta do" though it has not sunk into the protagonist's head that he's gotta do death, willingly, with all his affairs settled (ideally - Ibn Batuta did write that he has travelled all over the world and the only place he yet had to visit was the grave) ... and as this protagonist/character has, he does not have much to complain of except the fear of letting go. I suppose it's the fear we all have, and that all creatures go through when they disappear - to the satisfaction of some and as a generality in dealing with people, to the dissatisfaction of colleagues and loved ones. It was Steve Jobs who on realising he may have only days to live said later "I can say ... that nobody wants to die" - his cancer turned out to be, by some miracle, curable.
Nihilistic it is - Roth writes with the conviction of an atheist for whom death is precisely that - the end, the final curtain. This book is actually quite depressive reading. Though consoling words may be helpful, Roth scars the reader with the reality of the readers own mortality.
I can't see that the character has much to complain of. He had good parents, New York watch/jewellery merchants. He was beloved, by his parents, by his brother, by his wife/ves and a string of lovers. The salacious portions - indicating Roth's Danish heritage - is once with a relatively insensitive if utterly sexy Danish blonde. The characters proclivity for female flesh leavens and spices a sombre, reflective look back at his life in the third person. Sex and death, greed and hate have a habit of converging.
Short and undivided, Everyman does not compare it is true quite as favourably with Tolstoy's shorter book - The Death of Ivan ... as another reviewer has pointed out. There are probably quite a few books in this genre - though not biographies which are often celebrations of people's lives and deaths. Here is Roth's own, dark, brooding fear coming through and this darkness perhaps makes the book a poignant if perhaps uninformed narrative.
The afterlife for Roth remains an open and shut case. Why does he not conclude logically that life is death - that we interact with so many animated corpses on a daily basis? Maybe he could have rubbed it in even more rather than the envy of looking at age and sickness compared to the vitality and desirability of youth and young women's breasts. The protagonist is jealous of his brother's good health - I expect the brother could have written a warmer book and at least Roth makes this a possibility.
I was proud to read my first and who knows last Roth novel. 9/11, Jewishness, the art of gravedigging all highlights in this expose of a regret. As an indulgence, I reproduce the text of a poem - which is evocative of the sentiment in this work:
Corrections
I take a red pen to my life, cross out words like daughter, mother wife; strike out all those oughts and buts, the endless hopeful lies. Every day it's getting shorter. Even vanity fades along with bloom and giggle and slender. Last thing to go is my mind, never mine anyway. Like everything else, a story to keep myself uptight and coccupied, on the right side of my demon teachers. Each page is a horror of blots, omissions and errors. I hear myself thinking Could Try Harder. Try to ignore it, harder and harder; not to set my heart on ticks and stars, on how it might feel to be recycled, a clean sheet of paper, a fresh draft; someone else's name at the end. Linda France, Tomorrow's Moon (not available for sale)
Book Review: Death of an Ad Man
Summary: 4 Stars
I don't much remember my reaction to The Death of Ivan Ilych when I was assigned to read it in advanced-placement English as a high school senior. However, I still remember the turns of the book today. "Everyman" apes "Ilych" in many significant ways. Whether I'll still remember it in another 16 years the way I remember "Ilych" today is an open question, but I've been thinking a lot about it since I finished.
I passed up "Everyman" as a hardcover release last year, but got intrigued enough to try it now after Stephen King mocked it in a footnote to the the preface to his own black-comic tragedy, Blaze: A Novel. I'd classify "Everyman" as a black comedy itself, rather than an outright tragedy. Like "Ilych", it opens with the title character already dead, and ends with an epiphany that comes just a little too late. However, it's much earthier in tone -- it's a 21st century novel with lots of sex, rejection and cynicism.
It's hard to ever generate much true sympathy for Everyman, especially as his questionable late-life choices are contrasted with that of his happier, more successful brother. As the years fly by, Everyman turns his back on his religion, his wives, his sons, and his home city (New York). His career, as a prominent advertising director, is shown as ultimately meaningless beside his jeweler father's craftmanship and community influence (and faith). His circle of friends shrinks as his medical woes multiply. The most social we ever see him comes at the end of the book as he makes three condolence calls in a single afternoon. One imagines Roth wrote this book to exorcise several demons -- Everyman's appearance, not to mention several biographical details, closely mirror the author's own. Roth is laughing simultaneously both at the futility of evading death and at Death itself.
There are many strong passages in the book, as is to be expected from Roth. Coming in at under 200 pages in paperback, with wide margins and big print, this is a lean book with no punches pulled and little wasted space. The only real digression -- a conversation with a gravedigger about his craft mere pages before the end -- serves as a catalyst for that futile last-minute epiphany. Like The Sopranos - Season 6, Part 2, it's a novel about the passing of a time -- about New York post 9/11 and about Judaism post-World War II. The main character senses the foundations of his life racing away from him even as he refuses to find new meaning in anything else.
Whereas Stephen King portrayed "Everyman" as both mawkishly tragic and unintentionally funny, I found it quite the opposite. "Everyman" is a meditation about old age and a light opera about death. One can deride Everyman's life choices while still mourning his approaching demise. It's a complex little book, easy to read but hard to set aside.
Book Review: What a life
Summary: 4 Stars
In this short, intense novel Roth introduces us to his unique interpretation of the medieval morality play with the same name. Instead of having "everyman" being led by Death to confront God's judgement, Roth's nameless protagonist addresses the reader from his freshly dug grave. Is he asking for acceptance for the bad that outweighed the good or merely indulging in justifying his life and actions?
We meet "him" as the subject during the brief funeral ceremony attended by a handful of "friends" and family. His sons stand aside, clearly not overly affected by his death. The reader gets a sketch of the man from his brother's eulogy and the words of his ex-wife and daughter. All three speak of a long-ago past, his youthful self as a brother in their beloved parents' house, of a happy time with his wife or as a young father. That was when life was innocent and wholesome - before death. The mourners have hardly turned away when the story shifts to the recounting the protagonist`s life.
While Roth maintains a certain distance by writing in the third person, the following retrospective is very intimate and personal to his character. His meandering mind follows the different stages of his life, lingering with specifics and dialogs on some episodes, while brushing aside others that are deemed less important. In life, Roth's Everyman was certainly not your ordinary guy from down the street: he was a successful advertising director, wealthy and accepted by his peers. Abandoning his Jewish faith early on, he concentrated on the materialistic and hedonistic side of life. His three ex-wives were left primarily over his desire for sexual pursuits. Starting in middle age, heart problems became a concern and death lingered in the background. Still, thanks to modern medicine and his finances, he could afford the increasingly necessary heart procedures that brought him into his seventies. As he reflects on his deteriorating body, his unfulfilling leisure in retirement, his nostalgia for the safety and harmony of his parents' life almost overwhelms him as does his admiration for the man he once was. "The force that was mine! ...Once upon a time I was a full human being." The only person standing by him with care and loving in his old age is his daughter. Why is not clear, given that she suffered as much from the departure of her father as the sons did. They never forgave him for abandoning their mother and their reaction is met on his side by hatred and disrespect.
Roth has created a brilliant portrait of a rather unpleasant character. Does Everyman have much in common with the author? This was my first exposure to his themes and preoccupations. Roth's language economy is exquisite and skill in creating atmosphere and characters is at its best. The novel reads extremely well, despite some of the misgivings one might have with the description of "Everyman". [Friederike Knabe]
Book Review: "Everyman" may not be every man, but it does capture many American male struggles and angst
Summary: 4 Stars
The popularity and critical acclaim that Philip Roth has earned over the course of a fifty year literary career must stem from some basic truths that appeal to a fairly wide audience of readers and critics. If these truths weren't clear by now, "Everyman" makes them readily apparent: Philip Roth's works speak to the struggles, angst, foibles and follies of the educated upper middle class American male. What women may think of Philip Roth I have no idea, except by judging the reactions of female readers, which tend to be much less positive than male readers' reactions. Perhaps what Oprah and "The View" do for women, Philip Roth does for men.
The basic structure of "Everyman" is a man recounting (and often lamenting) the major episodes in his life, as he looks back while facing the inevitable and yet unpredictable end. "Everyman" springs from earth that Roth has tilled many times before: childhood in northeastern New Jersey; love, intimacy, marriage and divorce; family, especially fathers and brothers; and physical ailments and death. There is a particular emphasis in "Everyman" on the travails of aging, and the inevitable, inexorable decline as each person falls from the height of his powers to an often slow, agonizing, lonely death.
Although the details of each man's life differ, I believe that many upper middle class American men will identify with the struggles of the main character in "Everyman". He divorces three times, and while not every American man will do so, I think most will be able to identify with the forces that the main character struggles with. As time goes on, he ends up estranged from several close relations and his loneliness mounts, which are certainly issues that many older people face. The portrayal that "Everyman" presents of aging and death is not a nice one, but it may be an all too common one.
Being a short novel, "Everyman" does not have the space for long tangential off-shoots of narrative, or passages rooted in alternate realities, or other literary techniques employed by Roth in his longer works. In that sense it is one of his more straightforward works, and yet it does read as a complete unabbreviated work. Because Roth is capable of much more inventive works of literature, I wouldn't rank "Everyman" among his best, but for what it is, a short novel, it did please this reader.
Book Review: Life, death or something like them
Summary: 4 Stars
In Philip Roth's latest, "Everyman", a line appears out of the blue, and translates everything the writer is trying to tell in this novella. "Death is just death - it's nothing more". But when talking about death and all that comes with, the narrative is, above all, celebrating life. Or, at least, the fact of being alive, no matter how bad we are.
The title of the book express that the main character is supposed to represent a Joe Somebody, a man with nothing special, an ordinary type. This same casualness is present in the narrative. Roth doesn't bother too much of going deeper as he has done before. Much of "Everyman" reads like a list of complains and hospital situations involving the nameless protagonist. We follow him from childhood to death throughout the time he goes to the hospital - either to handle himself or somebody else.
This is not a light reading, mostly because the disease related plot - more than the death related plot. Except for the protagonist's infancy, "Everyman" is not interested in exploiting details of this man's life. It seems that Roth chose to do that deliberately. Probably he wants us to fill in the gaps. This is not a problem when a writer does that, but at the same time he offers something else to his readers, which is not the case here. This is not a bad book, but it is above the average when we consider Roth's work.
He is one of the most important American writers working today, that has investigated both the psychological side of contemporary America and its zeitgeist. But here he never achieves any of them. It is clear that this book could - and should go - for a psychological examination of life, aging and death. But we never have the feeling of satisfaction.
Roth might have had the urgency of writing this book. It indeed reads as something visceral, something very personal either. But, at the same time, it reads as a blueprint for something bigger, more complex, something in the same level of his best work, such as "American Pastoral".