UniBrow

For reasons disclosed well enough by its title–Everyman–we never learn the name of the protagonist of Philip Roth’s new novel. (I’ll just call him Everyman from here forward, silly as that feels.) Less immediately clear, though perhaps harboring a clue to what’s at issue here, is why Roth delays so long before revealing the name of one other character: Everyman’s third wife, Merete, a bit player, admittedly, a figure hardly more than sketched into this narrative–but one whose deferred christening merits reflection particularly as we consider the other women we meet from Everyman’s life. Merete is a model 26 years younger than her mate; she is a brittle, needy, risibly self-involved hand-wringer who, in sharp contrast to the more fully rendered females attending Everyman during prior hospitalizations, proves so painfully unequal to the occasion of his latest medical crisis that the surgeon, laying aside his usual reticence on such matters, refuses to release his recovering patient from the hospital until reassured that Merete won’t be the primary caregiver at home. “The woman is basically an absence and not a presence,” he says. Second wife Phoebe, the victim of Everyman’s cruelest betrayal, had been a strong, intelligent, and sympathetic woman who ably saw him through an earlier brush with death from peritonitis. It was Phoebe, moreover, who gave Everyman his warm and devoted daughter Nancy, now a grown woman “permeated by the quality of her mother’s kindness, by the inability to remain aloof from another’s need, by the day-to-day earthborn soulfulness that he had disastrously undervalued and thrown away–thrown away without beginning to realize all he would subsequently live without.” It’s a steep falloff indeed from Phoebe to this helpless whimpering ninny with whom it is impossible to imagine Everyman in any kind of mature and satisfying emotional relationship.

Merete first appears about a quarter of the way through the book, as Everyman enters the hospital for quintuple-bypass surgery, but it isn’t until 60-odd pages later–we are comfortably into the latter half of Roth’s 182-page tale–that she is referred to by name. I feel certain that this is a calculated postponement, since it must have been inconvenient for Roth to relate Merete’s pathetic conduct during Everyman’s heart-bypass hospitalization without being able to use her name. I suspect the reason that Merete, and Merete alone, is given this specific though temporary correlation with our unnamed Everyman is that her ”absence” from him during this ordeal re-enacts in capsule form his own repeated flights from emotional responsibility to the wives and children who populate his life. Merete is little more than a body to him, and by this point in his physical deterioration Everyman is little more than that to himself. The appetites of the body had always driven him; its failings are doing so now. And except for the steady attention of Nancy, whose undimmed affection and fidelity bring Everyman contentment and (considering his betrayal of her mother) shame in about equal measure, he passes his last years in a retirement facility, alone. Untrammeled contemplation of the “ultimate catastrophe” of death is about all that’s left to him now. “The worst of being unbearably alone was that you had to bear it–either that or you were sunk,” he thinks. “You had to work hard to prevent your mind from sabotaging you by its looking hungrily back at the superabundant past.”

If this apparent moral equivalency between the egregious Merete and Everyman, however sharply demarcated, seems a trifle unjust to our hero–who is not by any means an unsympathetic figure–there’s another parallel that seems to let him off too easy. At one point, sunk in despair over his poor health, Everyman finds himself burning with irrational resentment towards his older brother Howie, an almost inhumanly wonderful man who has had his brother’s back through everything. The source of Everyman’s corrosive envy is the vigorous good health that Howie has enjoyed all his life.

He could … in a frenzied mood, almost reach a point where he could believe that Howie’s good health was responsible for his own compromised health, even though he knew better, even though he was not without a civilized person’s tolerant understanding of the puzzle of inequality and misfortune. … [I]n his old age he had discovered the emotional state that robs the envier of his serenity and, worse, his realism–he hated Howie for that biological endowment that should have been his as well.

Suddenly he could not stand his brother in the primitive, instinctual way that his sons could not stand him.

Everyman had been meditating at some length just prior to this on the implacable hatred of the two sons, Randy and Lonny–the sons whose home and mother Everyman left years earlier for Phoebe. “It was inexplicable to him–the excitement they could seriously persist in deriving from his denunciation. … Was their steadfast posture of unforgivingness any more forgivable? Or any less harmful in its effect?” The implication of this conjunction is clear. Everyman has transcended his primitive resentment against Howie. Randy and Lonny should do the same where he is concerned. It’s possible, even probable, that Roth wants us to see this equivalency as facile and self-serving. What makes it just slightly difficult to draw this conclusion is that the sons’ anger goes unarticulated; their pain has no ballast in the text, and they stand before us as two flat, unattractive figures hardly to be distinguished even from each other. Had one of them been given a single speech even half as eloquent as the indictment read out to Everyman by Phoebe after his unpardonable betrayal of her, our hero’s self-exculpating disquisition would justly lose its superficial plausibility. Whatever the difference in circumstances, however unreasoning and self-lacerating the sons’ anger is all these years later, their pain is certainly no less real than Phoebe’s.

Everyman’s periodic illnesses and medical procedures are the engine of Roth’s plot, the poles that magnetize the novel’s incidents and disclosures, beginning with a childhood hernia operation and encompassing a ruptured appendix, two angioplasties, the bypass surgery, and the in-surgery cardiac arrest that finally kills him. (Trust me, I spoil nothing here: the book opens with Everyman’s funeral.) The novel is thus a kind of dramatized medical chart–you might say an etiography–and on the whole I would judge it a lesser thing than several other recent works by Roth. It certainly doesn’t rise to the heights of Sabbath’s Theater or American Pastoral or The Plot Against America, to name just a few of the books from the recent past–but its intensity and depth of feeling are very powerful at times. Roth’s prose uncoils with an unruffled fluency even during the novel’s most searing emotional crescendos. On view as well are the rather dewy-eyed American-dream rhapsodies we’ve come to expect from a book by Roth, whose reverence for the industry and stoicism of early 20th-century immigrants borders on the worshipful. But Everyman is ignited and sustained by a wild dread of extinction. One can’t help imagining Roth, now in his early 70s, alone in his rural Connecticut writing studio, unflinchingly scrutinizing every tormenting facet of the decay and death to which we are all heir until he is able to distill it all into harrowing apercus like this:

His father was going to lie not only in the coffin but under the weight of that dirt, and all at once he saw his father’s mouth as if there were no coffin, as if the dirt they were throwing into the grave was being deposited straight down on him, filling up his mouth, blinding his eyes, clogging his nostrils, and closing off his ears. He wanted to tell them to stop, to command them to go no further–he did not want them to cover his father’s face and block the passages through which he sucked in life. I’ve been looking at that face since I was born–stop burying my father’s face!

And this (contemplating his mother’s dead body):

What he saw was the high-relief contour of an elderly woman asleep. What he saw was a stone, the heavy, sepulchral, stonelike weight that says, Death is just death—it’s nothing more.

And–uncle already!–this:

Yet what he’d learned was nothing when measured against the inevitable onslaught that is the end of life. Had he been aware of the mortal suffering of every man and woman he happened to have known during all his years of professional life, of each one’s painful story of regret and loss and stoicism, of fear and panic and isolation and dread, had he learned of every last thing they had parted with that had once been vitally theirs and of how, systematically, they were being destroyed, he would have had to stay on the phone through the day and into the night, making another hundred calls at least. Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.

Some readers will find this sort of thing depressing or even terrifying, and I’ll admit to a wince or two myself here and there. I find solace here, too, however. Everyman is not the work of a mind wallowing in self-pity and hopelessness or in thrall to a nihilistic terror. It takes courage to shut oneself up in a room and face down bone-chilling realities in order to create a piece of art that is, after all–amid the anger and the despondency–held in place by an abiding sympathy and reverence for the human animal. Adorno says somewhere that every work of art, no matter how dark or tragic its tenor, is ultimately an affirmation, if only because it distills from the objective world a new world that stands as an autonomous force. No one needs me to second that emotion, but I do.