Philip Roth
Everyman’s Complaint
In his latest, Roth rages against the dying of the light.
By NAN GOLDBERG
Only a few years ago, Philip Roth composed an encomium to existence that took form as a tribute to the stars:
If the weather isn’t bad and it’s a clear night, I spend fifteen or twenty minutes before bedtime out on the deck looking skyward … from where I can see, from above the treeline, the whole heavenly inventory, stars unfurled in every direction, and, just this week, the planets Jupiter in the east and Mars in the west. It is beyond belief and also a fact, a plain and indisputable fact: that we are born, that this is here. … What you see from this silent rostrum up on my mountain … is that universe into which error does not obtrude. You see the inconceivable: the colossal spectacle of no antagonism. You see with your own eyes the vast brain of time, a galaxy of fire set by no human hand.
That’s from the last scene of the brilliant 1998 novel I Married a Communist, which culminates – both the passage and the novel – with four words, eight perfect syllables, of heartfelt iambic poetry: “The stars are indispensable.”
In startling contrast, Roth’s new novel, Everyman, contains a scene in which his 30-something hero is vacationing with the woman who will become his second wife. A new life is opening up before him, and he is deliriously happy. Nevertheless, each night as they walk together along the beach, “The dark sea rolling in with its momentous thud and the sky lavish with stars … frightened him. The profusion of stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die, and the thunder of the sea only yards away – and the nightmare of the blackest blackness beneath the frenzy of the water – made him want to run from the menace of oblivion to their cozy, lighted, under-furnished house.”
The stars are anything but indispensable.
Clearly, Roth is signaling a change here, from his typical ironic, darkly comic attitude to something much, much darker, with nothing funny about it.
Everyman begins with its central character’s funeral and ends up, in circular fashion, with his death. The man had retired some years earlier, after a successful career as an advertising director. He was the father of three children, the ex-husband of three ex-wives, a beloved son and brother, a respected colleague and friend, and, since his retirement, a pretty good painter. In other words, he was no better and no worse than most of us: “reasonable and kindly, an amicable, moderate, industrious man … not claiming to be exceptional. Only vulnerable and assailable and confused.”
And falling apart physically, bit by bit – practically decomposing before our eyes.
A good half of Everyman is consumed by a catalogue of the endless surgeries and procedures Roth’s unnamed hero must endure just to stay alive.
Beginning with a hernia operation at age 9, his first exposure to the fear of mortality if not mortality itself, the list of anatomical emergencies continues through a burst appendix at 34, which nearly killed him; quintuple bypass surgery at 56; then nine years later the obstruction of a renal artery requiring an angioplasty. The following year, another obstruction, this time in his left carotid artery, requiring a carotid endarterectomy. About 12 months later, a silent heart attack, another angioplasty, and another stent. The next year, another angioplasty and another stent. A year after that, three stents and the surgical insertion of a defibrillator, “a cardiac alarm system tucked into the wall of his chest.”
Each ordeal is rehearsed in sickeningly precise detail. During the bypass operation, “There were oxygen prongs in his nose and he was attached by numerous leads to a cardiac monitoring machine behind his bed. … The operation went on for seven hours. Much of that time he was connected to a heart-lung machine that pumped his blood and breathed for him. The doctors gave him five grafts, and he emerged from the surgery with a long wound down the center of his chest and another extending from his groin to his right ankle – it was from his leg that they had removed the vein from which all but one of the grafts was fashioned.”
The first angioplasty “was resolved with the insertion of a stent that was transported on a catheter maneuvered up through a puncture in the femoral artery and through the aorta to the occlusion.”
On another occasion, the doctor “inserted a stent in his left anterior descending artery, after ballooning the artery open where new deposits of plaque had formed. From the table he could watch the catheter being wiggled up into the coronary artery – he was under the lightest sedation and able to follow the whole procedure on the monitor as though his body were someone else’s.”
This whole question of the body, specifically its tyranny over all other components of the self – the terrifying fact of one’s being hostage to both the serious and the petty tribulations of the purely physical – comes up over and over again in Roth’s fiction: “(t)he body’s surface,” he mused in American Pastoral (1997), “which turns out to be . . . about as serious a thing as there is in life. The body, from which one cannot strip oneself however one tries, from which one is not to be freed this side of death.”
Swede Levov, the hero of American Pastoral, was blessed with a beautiful, healthy body. In Everyman, the protagonist’s body becomes more and more of a curse, a lemon, progressively weakened by one malfunction after another, until cardiac arrest finally takes him for good during yet another carotid endarterectomy.
Unlike the ageless diamonds that his father spent half a lifetime selling in his little shop in Elizabeth, New Jersey (called Everyman’s Jewelry Store), the body’s defining characteristic is its weakness, its mutability, its destructibility.
The father is dead now, but for his son, that store and those diamonds – and that father – glow as vividly in memory as the tiny gems glittering on the fingers of Union County’s blue-collar girlfriends and wives.
“It’s a big deal for working people to buy a diamond,” his father used to tell him and his brother Howie, “no matter how small. The wife can wear it for the beauty and she can wear it for the status. And when she does, this guy is not just a plumber – he’s a man with a wife with a diamond. His wife owns something that is imperishable. Because beyond the beauty and the status and the value, the diamond is imperishable. A piece of the earth that is imperishable, and a mere mortal is wearing it on her hand!”
Unlike his body, this man’s memory is as sharp as it ever was, and the older he gets the more time he spends looking backward. These elegant vignettes of recollection – miniature portraits of the jewelry store in Elizabeth; of his mother and father and brother; of his marriages and children; of his love affairs – comprise the only parts of the narrative not devoted to depression, disease, and death.
Sadly, though, replaying these events ends up convincing him that he has mostly screwed up his one and only life. Not 100 percent, but momentously enough that his regret is visceral, shattering, both to him and to us. Neither of his sons, the children of his first marriage, will speak to him. His relationship with Howie has recently been fraught with tension and resentment. Only one of the protagonist’s three marriages was not a huge mistake, and he betrayed that wife with his infidelities. His suffering becomes emotional as well as physical as he anguishes over his bad behavior and dumb decisions – particularly the divorces, for which his children, among others, paid a steep price.
Simultaneously, he can’t help but bear witness to the suffering of those he sees around him: his neighbor, a woman in constant physical agony who finally kills herself with an overdose of medication; the other residents of the retirement village where he lives, whose conversation “invariably turned to matters of sickness and health, their personal biographies having by this time become identical with their medical biographies”; the former colleagues whose obituaries he reads in The New York Times; the stroke that partially paralyzes Phoebe, his second wife and the mother of his beloved only daughter, Nancy.
In the anteroom of the hospital where he goes to have his first endarterectomy, another of the waiting patients, a man with pasty skin and a weak voice, begins to talk to him. “First my mother died,” the guy says, “six months later my father died, eight months after that my only sister died, a year later my marriage broke down and my wife took everything I had. And that’s when I began to imagine someone coming to me and saying, ‘Now we’re going to cut off your right arm as well. Do you think you can take that?’ And so they cut off my right arm. Then later they come around and they say, ‘Now we’re going to cut off your left arm.’ Then, when that’s done, they come back one day and they say, ‘Do you want to quit now? Is that enough? Or should we go ahead and start in on your legs?’ And all the time I was thinking, When, when do I quit? When do I turn on the gas and put my head in the oven? When is enough enough? That was how I lived with my grief for ten years. It took ten years. And now the grief is finally over and this shit starts up.”
What is the purpose of this unrelenting medical and emotional onslaught? It’s as if Roth has given in to despair and disgust: Is this really all there is? Is this – just this – how we are all doomed to end up? “Old age isn’t a battle,” Roth’s hero thinks bitterly. “Old age is a massacre.”
“There’s no remaking reality,” his father had often told him as a child. “Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes.” He, in turn, had had occasion to offer this advice to Nancy, who repeats it at his funeral and immediately begins to cry. Because knowing that there is no remaking reality does not, ultimately, ease the suffering.
And why should it? Everything from which he’d once derived a natural joy now causes him an unnatural anguish. From his neat Jersey Shore condo, he gets to look out at the same ocean where as a boy he used to vacation with his family, where his “slender little torpedo of an unscathed body once rode the big Atlantic waves from a hundred yards out in the wild ocean all the way in to shore.” But now he sees something utterly different: “How long could he watch the tides flood in and flow out without his remembering, as anyone might in a sea-gazing reverie, that life had been given to him, as to all, randomly, fortuitously, and but once, and for no known or knowable reason?”
Everyman is so dark, so full of death and despair, that reading it I began to worry that Roth, who has often written thinly disguised novels about himself, is dying.
Not so, a noted editor and publicist assured me; an acquaintance, he said, had seen Roth recently and “seems to think Philip’s health is okay and that his writing is a vigorous response to the inevitable old age.” I was enormously relieved to hear it. Personally, I cannot imagine a world without Philip Roth writing in it. He probably can’t imagine it either, and yet he is approaching an age when the inevitability of extinction can no longer be ignored or denied. This book might be a sort of exercise, Roth’s attempt to come as close as he can, without dying, to experiencing death.
I can’t speak for him. But for me, reading it evoked more paralyzing despair than greater understanding of death. In fact, if you happen to be sick or dying, you should probably skip this book, which seems to simultaneously convey both more and less than you want to know. Ironically, Everyman may be Roth’s least successful attempt to cross the mysterious boundary between the personal and the universal that is fiction’s raison d’etre. Perhaps this particular exercise, the forging of a relationship between you and your own death, can only be attempted privately, on your own.
SUGGESTED READING:
FICTION:
GENEALOGY, by Maud Casey; Harper Perennial, 288 pp., $13.95 (paper original): The Hennarts – Samantha and Bernard and their children, Ryan and Marguerite – are a family whose history is rife with damaging secrets, plans that go awry, and tolerance for each other’s peculiarities that’s based mostly on denial. Yet their fierce love for each other comes through clearly in this masterful novel, which combines the rhythm and grace of poetry with the hypnotic tension of a great mystery.
ON LOVE, by Alain de Botton (Grove Press, 194 pp., $12: This hilarious new edition of the international best-seller by the author of How Proust Can Change Your Life (Pantheon, 1997) is an anatomy of a love affair, from the delirium of the first shared attraction right through to the pathetic manipulative tactics of a lover about to be left behind.
WE ARE ALL WELCOME HERE, by Elizabeth Berg; Random House, 208 pp., $22.95: In Berg’s 15th novel, a daughter tells the story of her remarkable and heroic mother, who contracted polio at the end of her pregnancy, delivered her daughter while in an iron lung, then managed to raise her child alone despite being left paralyzed from the neck down.
NON-FICTION:
Although a generation or two ago a manual on this subject would probably have been unthinkable, or at least nonsensical, this season brings not one, not two, but three books on how to be happy. In HAPPINESS: A HISTORY, by Darrin M. McMahon (Atlantic Monthly Press, 544 pp., $27.50), 2,000 years of philosophy, science, and art are scoured for the roots of our obsession with becoming, and staying, happy. STUMBLING ON HAPPINESS, by Daniel Gilbert (Knopf, 304 pp., $24.95), corrects the common mistakes people make when they set goals for achieving happiness. HAPPINESS: A GUIDE TO DEVELOPING LIFE’S MOST IMPORTANT SKILL, by Matthieu Ricard (Little, Brown, 288 pp., $22.95), has the distinction of being written by a Buddhist monk (who used to be a molecular biologist) and is also the only one of the three that straightforwardly calls itself a “guide,” instead of disguising itself as something else, like a history or an analysis.
They all look interesting, but I don’t know which of the three is better, because I decided, after glancing at all of them, that what would make me happy would be to read something else.
I AM MY MOTHER’S DAUGHTER: MAKING PEACE WITH MOM BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE, by Iris Krasnow; Basic Books, 224 pp., $25: How do you reconcile your fantasy of the mother you wish you had with the distinctly flawed person who actually raised you? In interviews with hundreds of women in mid-life, Krasnow found that everyone had old complaints and resentments, some of them quite serious. But “ditching old baggage and learning to love our mothers must come before we learn to love, and know ourselves.” The time to reconcile is now, Krasnow insists: “You can’t say, ‘Let’s work this out’ at a funeral.”
HOUSE THINKING: A ROOM-BY-ROOM LOOK AT HOW WE LIVE, by Winifred Gallagher; HarperCollins, 330 pp., $24.95: What makes a home feel right, as opposed to looking right? Gallagher’s psychological tour of the American home illustrates her theory that your house not only reflects who you are, but also influences whom you will become.
