I only just now read Everyman by Philip Roth. I finished it about half an hour ago, laid it down, picked it up again and began reading once more from the beginning – the graveside scene – finally sighing and laying it aside once more at the point where the older brother of the deceased – the brother who was never sick a day in his life – begins talking endlessly about his younger, now dead, sibling. This character, Howie, begins his graveside comments, in fact, with an aside to his wife: “My kid brother. It makes no sense.”
And it doesn’t, of course. And, of course, it does. How many novels do you know that begin with the ending? Where everything in between the first word and the final page will consist of stages and pages of a plot whose outcome you already know? Reports begin that way, perhaps: here is the executive summary, now let’s see what we do with what we know. But this is not a report. And there’s nothing to do, nothing at all. It’s over. But you knew that from the beginning, right? So what kept you reading?
You read on because it’s Philip Roth and he can’t write a bad or an uninteresting sentence. But as you read, it becomes something more. Deeply absorbing, even profound. You’ve heard the climax, Roth seems to be saying, Now get set for the longest denouement in literary history. And what a denouement it is! How he ties up loose ends that weren’t even loose at the beginning! And keeps you reading. How he fills in a life that was a very ordinary life, the life of a man who was neither steadfast nor exemplary, nor incredibly talented, who had no great adventures, but the events of whose days you are willing to hear about and sympathize with and, despite individual differences between that character and yourself, you identify with because the fate to which he tends is your fate as well. Absolutely. We die. We all die. And how would your life be summed up? Not very differently, certainly not fundamentally different – whether or not you had Philip Roth to write about it.
So the rather simple plot of the protagonist’s life unfolds – a lifetime job as an art director for an ad agency, a mild passion for painting, three wives, a few affairs on the side (the discovery of one sets the stage for the rather overwhelming isolation he suffers at the end), a devoted daughter, two bitter, neglected and unforgiving sons – an unremarkable life in almost every respect. And the last years are full of sickness, decline, decay, and fear of the outcome that you already know has been accomplished. “That undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns,” as Shakespeare reminds us.
Yet there is more tenderness in this book, I believe, than is to be found by adding together all the other books Roth wrote. This is not satire, nor comedy, nor clever plot-twists, nor the smorgasbord of other characteristics we have come to expect from a Roth novel. Yes, there is a barely muffled rage, a barrage of cris de coeur, but they are our cries as well as his and his character’s cries. The last few years, as described, are seen as a kind of half-life in which our hero witnesses friends, colleagues and family dying of cancer, having strokes, entering hospitals as suicidal depressives, and where our hero himself undergoes procedure after procedure to fix this or that rancorous and dangerous ailment. His life has begun to seem mostly about being operated on. That and watching friends die, and recounting one’s errors. And a few – very few – memories of the good times. Yet in these pages you feel you have seen the real thing, and an inescapable sad empathy blossoms, not only for him – poor wretch, poor jerk! — but for the whole, baffling, patched-together mess of the human condition, with its utterly final, ineluctable outcome. Death isn’t just a battle, Roth says at one point. It’s a massacre.
And yet. Here we the living still are, for a few brief moments more, trying to remember a vigorous swim across the bay, or a fond poem, or a tennis match we won against seemingly impossible odds, or a tender handclasp and a sweet embrace.
No wonder he called it Everyman.