BOOK - "Everyman"

Do old people do anything after they get old, except get older? Philip Roth’s last novel, The Plot Against America, convinced me that they could grow as authors, shaking off shades of Zuckerman to tap into new genres (like alternative history) that would explore isolation on a broader scheme. Perhaps that was a fluke: Roth’s new novel, Everyman, ambles too politely towards death, belaying the inevitable by discussing the advance of death, observing the death of others, and mulling the death of one’s livelier (and more promiscuous) youth. In many ways, it is like Gilead or The Sea, only sans the invigorating reflections of the active first person. Trapped in the third person, Everyman remains excessively broad and rarely emotional: a stagnant, perfunctory read. Nothing exciting happens, and the language is dull as death.

Where Roth salvages his narrative, and where more time and attention should have been focused, are in his descriptions of family. He begins Everyman by shattering the illusion of a happy ending: the family members are attending the main character’s funeral. We see, in some splendid pages, how much this man has left behind, and then, as the book progresses, how dead he already was to these people. That’s something we can empathize with: the death of love while we are still living to acknowledge it. “He [his younger son, Lonny,] was overcome with a feeling for his father that wasn’t antagonism but that his antagonism denied him the means to release. When he opened his mouth, nothing emerged except a series of grotesque gasps, making it appear likely that whatever had him in its grip would never be finished with him.”

Other passages fall into the trap of deprecatory humor: “An oncologist, a urologist, an internist, a hospice nurse, and a hypnotist”—already it sounds like a joke¬—“to help me overcome the nausea.” “The nausea from what, from therapy?” “Yeah, and the cancer gives you nausea too. I throw up liberally.” “Is that the worst of it?” “Sometimes my prostate feels like I’m trying to excrete it.” Ha, ha. Funny. But not.

Still other passages seem like recycled Roth anecdotes about foolish faith—“Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life”—or overabundant descriptions that are closer to fodder than anything poignant: “On the evenings he drove over to eat broiled bluefish on the back deck of the fish store that perched at the edge of the inlet where the boats sailed out to the ocean under the old drawbridge, he sometimes stopped first at the town where his family had vacationed in the summertime.” Ha, ha. Funny. But not.

Roth quotes Chuck Close within his novel: “Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.” If this sad, small, uninspired novel is the mark of a professional, then turn to the amateurs. There’s nothing new or interesting here.