Like a number of Philip Roth's recent novels, Everyman begins, Citizen Kane like, at the end. In the case of Everyman, the end really is the end. The end of the person whose tale the book recounts.
Roth's Everyman is buried with his family about him, eulogised by his beloved daughter Nancy and his unfairly put upon brother Howie. We glimpse the boyhood and the man our Everyman was and became.
They say:
The Independent: “Every sentence and every paragraph works with the coiled precision of the watch mechanisms that the narrator's father repairs, and glitters with the lapidary perfection of the diamonds he sells.”
Daily Telegraph: “What's even more amazing? This book may tackle decrepitude and death, but Everyman is so poignant, droll, and eloquent that it's not depressing in the slightest.”
The Guardian: “This is to quibble, but quibbling, in this context, is justified. It might be claimed that the overall flatness of style in Everyman is the mark of a master disdaining mere technique, but that will not quite do.”
We say:
Roth's Everyman is a diary of pain, a study of the steps medical science can now take to prolong life, and a roll call of what it takes to keep a man breathing in and out each and every day.
From the funeral, we retreat to the night before the surgery that killed him. Our man's mind wanders to all the people who were there waiting for him when he awoke from previous surgical experiences, focusing on the useless wife who was on hand to make the recovery from his quintuple bypass surgery all the more difficult.
Never forget the epigram that informs the book – a fragment from Keats' Ode to a Nightingale that sees “men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs/ Where youth grows pale, and spectre thin, and dies/ Where but to think is to be full of sorrow...” – and don't forget that this is a book that comes sandwiched between two funereal black covers. It's all downhill from here.
We plunge into a rather gruesome cardiovascular operation that takes in the adultery that ended his marriage to Phoebe – one day someone will get to the bottom of Mr Roth's obsession with adultery – and the death of his father. We hear about the hideous scars across his chest and his groin, where a vein is all but removed to provide skin grafts for his heart.
Later in life he requires surgery to the left carotid artery for a major obstruction. This is particularly gruesome – a reading experience through clenched fingers if ever there was one. Then it's pretty much game over as “not a year went by when he wasn't hospitalized”.
Roth’s twenty seventh novel is faultless in terms of its execution. Here’s an enormously talented writer saying, look: here is death, look at it, stare it in the face. It will have you too, this is merely a glimpse of what is in store for you.
Enjoyable is not the word, essential is. The man can do no wrong.
AUTHOR
Philip Roth
POSTED...
Sun 30 Jul 2006 at 9:14am
