Customer Reviews

Everyman

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2 star:		(16)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This book turned out to be more than a good read for me; it was an experience.

I need to start this review by saying I really like Philip Roth. Books like American Pastoral and The Human Stain and many of his older books were terrific reads for me.

This is a very short book. Normally Philip Roth can go on and on, (you know how often you can turn the page in a Roth book and see that the next two pages are all one paragraph....) but he rarely does that here. This book is very spare. Some reviews say too much so, but I disagree.

Summary, no spoilers:

The story first starts off with the protagonists funeral, and then goes back in time with him narrating the story of his life.

We hear about his fear of death, and his intense frustration with his increasing health problems. In essence, the human condition. And the narrator is a man with no religious convictions to soften the blow.

I have read some criticism that the character is not fully developed, but I disagree. Our narrator, (unnamed), tells us bits and pieces of his life, from different times in his life. It is a thumbnail sketch of an existence. There is just enough detail so that it feels real, and we can identify with his childhood exuberance, and his middle-age wanderlust.

Roth manages to touch on so many universal truths, and for me, there were many times I found myself nodding my head in understanding.

Yes, the book is short, very short, but perhaps because of this, and because of Roth's skill as a writer, when I turned the last page I felt like I had read something much longer. It did not need one more word.

Highly recommended. It's the work of a great artist again sharing his observations about life in a way that makes us empathize.

First the caveats. This is not a play; it is a novel. This is not an allegory; it is a realistic narrative. This is not about everyman; it is about a specific individual. Everyman is not a secularized Jewish New Yorker with a brother worth $50,000,000, three wives, and the opportunity to have hot sex with a Danish model. The life of the unnamed protagonist does, however, link with common aspects of human experience in striking and sometimes profound ways.

There are three major themes. The first is the exploration of the Scottish proverb that (put more decorously) an aroused male member has no conscience. When it follows its impulses the results are often ultimately unpleasant. The second, more important theme, is the illustration of Yeats's notion that as we age we increasingly feel as if our hearts--sick with desire--are "fastened to a dying animal." The book is a meditation on death, but more particularly a meditation upon the ways in which our bodies (some of our bodies; the protagonist's brother is healthy as well as rich) fail and betray us. The third is the importance of family and friends, but particularly family--a nexus of relationships that we see as important when we stop being selfish and begin to be wise.

The story is beautifully written, beautifully plotted, beautifully realized. It is grim but neither hollow nor depressing, erotic but not lurid. Most of all it is rich in details and descriptions. Highly recommended.

If you're like me, and you consider Philip Roth to be one of the historic literary greats, it doesn't matter what I or anybody else has to say about Everyman: you're going to read this book. But I think you'll find Everyman to be less than satisfying. There's very little "astonishing" in this book, as there is in every page, if not in every paragraph, of Roth's best novels. On the subject of old age and imminent oblivion, Roth himself did a better and more artistic job in Sabbath's Theater and the novels narrated by Zuckerman (remember the old man in I Married a Communist?). Death is horrifying, but awesomely horrifying. Everyman is devoid of awe.

It's not apparent to me what Roth wants the reader to think of the main character. The title and numerous passages in the book indicate the guy exemplifies average, normal mankind, but he doesn't. As you would expect from a Roth protagonist, the Everyman character is abnormally incompetent at family life, and abnormally obsessed with silly sex. I'm not giving anything away here, but the guy craters a good marriage in favor of anal sex with an airhead. What are we supposed to make of that particular in a book that takes on existential themes? The good wife's furious denunciation of her husband are the best pages in the book: fluent, copious, intelligent rage, like something out of Greek tragedy.

As I said, you know Roth is a national treasure, you're going to read this book, and you should. But you won't re-read it, as you do your favorite Roth novels.

Everyman takes us on a life journey and as everyone knows by know, Roth was using the great medieval allegorical drama of the same title as his model. This is a book about cosmic angst, about facing the oblivion that awaits us as we age. Roth has tackled this subject before--in some sense, all major writers have tackled it. In the introduction to Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut, quoting Ferdinand Celine writes, "No art is possible without a duty dance with death." So here is Roth's duty dance, although he has certainly waltzed across this floor before in the Zuckerman books, "Sabbath's Theater,""The Dying Animal," and in many other of his 26 books.

The treatment here is a bit different--more relentless and focussed, although at the same time, more generalized and abstract. Although all of the people around the unnamed narrator are specified, he remains something of a cipher, and certainly doesn't have the presence of a Zuckerman or a Portnoy. Nonetheless, the book makes for engaging reading. Roth's lesser works are more compelling than the work of most American writers.

Let's get this out of the way: EVERYMAN is not Moby Dick, Things Fall Apart or Crime and Punishment. It does not compare with Roth's own recent streak of novels that engage the historical and the personal. It is on its own out there, on a very different scale with a different fight. It is brave, accessible and eloquently crafted, as is the Roth way. It is the ripened vision that only aging can render and for that it stands alone not only in the author's repertoire but across contemporary fiction. I haven't read everything, that's for sure, but I've read a considerable amount and I can't remember another novelist saying, this is how we die when we have made it to the end, when we've outlived the possibilities of dying in wars or at the hands of others, or otherwise tragically young. Maybe someone else has, Roth just makes it seem new and original.

It's not that Roth's protagonist lives to very old age or outlived his generation. The book begins with his funeral, he having died during heart surgery in his early 70's. It then retreats back to his boyhood and moves forward, to look at an ordinary, flawed life through the lens of mortality. Many of the choices he makes, that propel him from one stage in life to the next, are either in defiance of or informed by the knowledge that not only can we die, we will.

Some complain that because the book is short, Roth was skimming. Uh-uh. There's a message in that medium. One well-known critic called his protagonist a "hollow man." Again, I beg to disagree: he is ordinary and recognizable for a reason and the information he serves up is interesting, provocative.

This is a book written from an unusual perspective, shifting from a funeral of a man backwards. In the process, we watch him struggle with what is already facing (or will be) many Baby Boomers - the shift past Middle age into the later years of life, health issues, heart problems and a new perspective on his entire life. Roth does not wrap everything up in a neat package and he doesn't serve up comforting platitudes. This might not be to everyone's taste but as an aging Baby Boomer, I really related to this book.

I just finished this book and, being a middle aged Baby Boomer, I was absolutely astounded at the feelings it roused in me. I know that my response will not be the same as that of a young person reading it and my advice to the younger reader would be to save this book and read it again in 20 years. The "everyman" of the title is the unnamed protagonist whose funeral opens the novel. We are taken back over his life to see his youthful gusto slowly erode into middle age beset by health problems he neither anticipated nor believed he deserved. His errors in judgment are tempered by his guilt and also by the knowledge that he probably would not have done anything differently if he had the chance. A study on what it feels like to still be young enough to want to enjoy life and yet to remember what it was like to be much more energetic and alive (I particularly related to the passages where he reminisced about swimming in the ocean, something I used to enjoy), this small book is provocative and thought-provoking. It states so well the angst of the middle-aged person who knows his life is now more than half over, and yet who doesn't want to think about that. Every day his body tells him, though, and he can't deny the truths of a harsh reality. The protagonist battles his own demons and compares his life to that of his hard working parents and his caring, and highly successful brother. His behaviour has alienated him from his ex-wives and most of his children, and although he seems to seek solitude, he yearns for intimacy. I was deeply moved by this book. It is so well written; I admire a writer who can pack so much emotion into so few words, and Philip Roth has done that very well.

OK Roth I know you are one of our 'great' American novelists, but enough is enough already. 'Everyman' is a rehash of so many previous Roth novels. This slim book begins with our Everyman's funeral and through a series of flashbacks we learn about his familiar Rothian past - growing up in Newark, the child of lower-middle class Jews, his father the proud owner of a small jewelery store; the sexually dissatisfied protagonist leaving three wives for younger and tastier models, the last a Danish model 25 years his junior who is so dim and immature that his doctor will not release him to her care after surgery; the angry children of his first marriage; the desire for a career as a painter left in the dust to pursue a more lucrative career in advertising; the various heart surgeries. Roth has mined this territory already ad nauseum. I can't see anything that he has added here. Poor Roth seems to need to write these works to expiate his own guilt for past misdeeds and as an exercise to work out his fear of death. Still there is a beauty in his prose and this is why I continue to come back to him. But I long for another work of the power and distinction of the vastly superior "Human Stain".

For years, I've thought that Tolstoy's "Death of Ivan Ilych" was the single most insightful fictional reflection on the fragility of life. I just spent the last two days reading and re-reading Roth's _Everyman_, and I'm convinced that it ranks right up there with Tolstoy.

All of us who are in our 50s or above can appreciate the bittersweet, bewildered, sometimes angry, and utterly authentic way in which Roth's protagonist confronts the mystery of aging and dissolution. The loneliness and helpless feelings frequently associated with aging--both of which are exacerbated by still burning sexual desire with the dismal realization that one's own sexual desirability is gone--the regret at past mistakes, the encompassing sense of fragility: Roth captures them all.

And he does so with language that sometimes breaks the heart. At one point, for example, the lonely 70+ protagonist flirts with a 30-something jogger and gives her his telephone number. "She never called. And when he took his walks he never saw her again. She must have decided to do her jogging along another stretch of the boardwalk, thereby thwarting his longing for the last great outburst of everything." Or this, with the protagonist in a reflective mood: "How long could he watch the tides flood in and 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?" Or this, in describing the protagonist's death: "He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start."

Brilliant, honest, sobering.

Philip Roth's latest offering is a beautifully written contemplation of the mortality that each of us must face. The protaganist's journey through life as a son and brother, father and frequent husband, punctuated by life-threatening illnesses along the way, strikes one as a warning to revel in life's beauty and bounty during the short while that we are here.

Roth's character envies his wealthy and successful brother's robust health, but his brother loves him unconditionally, eulogizing the protaginist in the first few pages of this slim novel. After dispatching with his main character at the outset, Roth then takes us back through a man's life and loves and full circle to his end.

The warning to us all comes through one of the protaginist's doctors when the character complains following a hospitalization that he does not want to miss the fall. The doctor tells his patient that he really doesn't get it and that he nearly missed everything.

Roth's beautiful use of the ocean of the Jersey shore as a sort of welcoming presence of some, possibly, afterlife experience is memorable.

I think of Roth along with his contemporaries John Updike and sadly, the recently departed Saul Bellow, as the greatest American voices in literature and Philip Roth's latest book does not disappoint.