Everyman

16/03/2025

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Without Metaphysical Horizon

       Like The Humbling and The Dying Animal, Everyman can be seen as a late, short Philip Roth novel that tarries with death, doom, despair and other words that bleakly begin with d. The Jonathan Cape hardcover couldn’t be less inviting: all black except for the white of the title a third of the way down, and, in white too, Philip Roth’s name, twice the size of the title, near the bottom. It also has the faintest of reddish brown lines framing the first two-thirds of the cover but the point is a dark bluntness and the awareness that if the character is potentially an everyman, the writer is not. 

     The title belongs not just to the unnamed central character, but also to the father’s jewellery shop, a store offering decent deals for customers who want good quality rings and necklaces but don't always have the money. “He never checked their credit, as long as he got his cost out of it, they could come in afterwards and pay a few dollars more a week, even nothing, and he really didn’t care. He never went broke with credit, and the goodwill generated by his flexibility was more than worth it.” The reflection on his father’s life comes after the family has just buried him and the protagonist looks back on his own as he conjures up his father’s. Yet, while the father dies a few years before him in time, his death comes after the protagonist’s in the narrative, with the book opening and closing on our hero’s demise. If it is contained by these two funerals, while invoking other deaths as well, it is punctuated by the various operations the protagonist undergoes throughout his life. As Nicholas Spice notes: “the basic narrative of Everyman is a chronological sequence: the history of the protagonist’s illnesses, hospital stays and operations since he was a boy. The dates are precise: 1942, aged nine – hernia operation; 1967, aged 34 – burst appendix; 1989, aged 56 – quintuple bypass surgery; 1998, aged 65 – operation to remove obstruction to the renal artery.”  (London Review of Books) 

      The book earns the sombre hue of its cover, and though Spice reckons Everyman a “brief, disconsolate and in certain respects disagreeable novel” that lacks the humour and energy evident in most of Roth’s work, it can seem an example of late style if we think of the opening lines of Edward Said’s book On Late Style. “The relationship between bodily condition and aesthetic style seems at first to be a subject so irrelevant and perhaps even trivial by comparison with the momentousness of life, mortality, medical science, and health, as to be quickly dismissed. Nevertheless, my contention is as follows: all of us, by virtue of the simple fact of being conscious, are involved in constantly thinking about and making something of our lives, self-making being one of the bases of history, which according to Ibn Khaldun and Vico, the great founders of the science of history is essentially the product of human labor.” Roth's book can be viewed as the failed attempt to make that life, and the body failing as well to remain healthy. Unlike his elder brother Howie he hasn’t made a fortune ($20m), nor, like his brother, has he had a long and successful marriage. He didn’t devote himself to art either, instead making a very decent but relatively modest income in advertising. The book examines the twofold failure of his life and his body as he can't but envy his brother’s robust health, marriage and fortune. 

     Yet the book could never have been called envy for there is no enmity between these brothers, only a lack of communication near the end of it that the reader becomes privy to as a detail early on and as a motivation later on. “We spoke on the phone whenever we could, though near the end of his life”, Howie says, “he cut himself off from me for some reason that was never clear.” What becomes clear to us halfway through the book is that the central character became cold towards him. “The reason was ridiculous. He hated Howie because of his robust good health. He hated Howie because he’d never in his life been a patient in a hospital, because disease was known to him, because nowhere was his body scarred from the surgical knife, nor were there six metal stents lodged in his arteries along with a cardiac alarm system trucked into the wall of his chest that was called a defibrillator…” One is unlikely to take this seriously as hate, the sort of enviable hatred Martin Amis and Michel Houellebecq often traffic in their work and perhaps paradoxically provides much of the humour found in it. (They take hate so seriously it becomes funny.) 

It is instead despair in need of a subject and the contrast between the two brothers is pronounced, thus who better than Howie to feel the injustices of life at work? They are from the same genetic stock after all, and Howie six years his senior but there he is an ongoing specimen of ill health whose brother, at the protagonist’s funeral, “still appeared as if he could run a football through the middle of the line, and he was seventy-seven years old.” Howie has never been hospitalised and Roth’s novel is structured around the very fact that the protagonist often has been, a point not only Spice makes but Roth himself. “The subject is really illness. In fact, It isn't just about aging. My method was to trace the history of this man's illnesses from the time he's a child. So, in a certain way it's a medical biography. You know, doctors have these dossiers on us, in which they have all our illnesses listed, and this is that doctor's dossier from the other side. It's the patient's dossier, really.” (NPR)

      Our central character hates the injustice of his condition and finds its most fruitful antithesis in his brother. While in reality there may be a problem with drawing connections between life and ill health, with the patient in danger of being blamed for the misfortunes that befall them, fiction is more inclined as it looks for a justifiable causality to associate character with predicament. The best of them will see this isn’t cause and effect but will at least carry within it the assumption that, what has befallen a person, and how they've lived, isn’t unconnected, with The Death of Ivan Ilyich a good example. When in Everyman the protagonist looks back on his existence, he sees how badly he seems to have lived next to Howie, and while he doesn’t regret his first divorce, he knows that he made a mess of his second marriage. If his body has increasingly let him down in his later fifties and his sixties, his body in the immediate years before then caused him problems through virility. He just couldn’t remain faithful to a woman he very much loved, whether this is the fling he embarks on in his office, or a mad affair he starts on a trip to the Caribbean with a Danish model half his age, one that he continues on the other side of the world from the States, and that will end, terribly, in marriage. It is a third that seems a bigger mistake than the first. We’re told the infidelities started before he turned fifty and maybe it took longer than he might have expected, if it were to happen at all. “…but that it took so long to happen, even after the passion had dwindled and disappeared from his marriage” surprised him almost as much as the sex he started to demand. He may not have slept with Phoebe for six years prior to the first fling with the secretary, but he would have assumed that this is the inevitable lot of contented married life.  It isn’t only that he sleeps with other women; he also lies about it as well — a correlative in almost every instance shy of an open relationship, but leaves a loving situation eventually mired by doubt and betrayal. “Why should you want to unhinge everything?” Phoebe says. "I who never doubted you, to whom it rarely occurred even to question you, and now I can never believe another word you say. I can never trust you to be truthful again.” Actually, Phoebe did doubt him, aware of the affair with the secretary, even as she only confronts him when he lies about his reason for being in Europe, where he has been with the Dane. 

           It would be wrong to say the book is an exploration of a man’s regrets correlated to his failing health, but it wouldn’t be inaccurate to see them at least partially interlinked. The book seems to propose that Howie’s good health is closely associated with his moral health while the central character’s poor moral well-being isn’t completely removed from his bodily decay. It is a dimension Susan Sontag sees in many a text, and thinks of the literary use of TB: “however much TB was blamed on poverty and insalubrious surroundings, it was still thought that a certain inner disposition was needed to contract the disease.” (Illness as Metaphor) By this reckoning, Everyman is always going to be a weak man morally and physically next to Howie, and which one leads to the other happens to be part of Roth’s enquiry. The central character has already as a small child had his tonsils removed, but the hernia operation several years later takes on a different quality, and we are told that with the development of the hernia he was worried he might have to wear a corset. “He knew of a boy at school who wore such a corset, and one of the reasons he’d told no one about the swelling was his fear that he too would have to wear a corset and reveal it to the other boys when he changed into his shorts for the gym class.” Physical vulnerability meets social vulnerability, and while in his early years his weakness next to his big brother led to seeing him as “an object of worship”, the various afflictions over many years alters the nature of that admiration.

           This would explain to Howie the inexplicable reason why Everyman cuts himself off from his brother but it probably wouldn’t quite be clear to the central character why he feels this bitterness towards Howie. When at fifty-six our hero has a quintuple bypass operation, it is Howie who suggests hiring a couple of nurses to look after him day and night, and Howie also insists on paying for them. Everyman has an affair with one of them, Maureen Mrazek, a woman whose patients had a habit of falling in love with her and sometimes this was reciprocated. But whatever she had with Everyman was meaningful enough for her to show up more than a decade later at his funeral. He would seem to owe his brother a lot and yet there he is hardly able to contact him except when in a moment of desperation he tries to get in touch, with the idea that he might be able to live with him and his wife on their huge Santa Barbara ranch. Our hero gets one of the kids on the phone; his father and his mother are off in Tibet. There he is a man where “not a year went by when he wasn’t hospitalized” and his brother is travelling to places Everyman didn’t know you could visit. “Are Westerners allowed in Tibet?” he asks his brother’s son. His brother can still think of enlightenment, perhaps; our hero is left with the void. “It was time to worry about oblivion.”

         He could just assume that Howie was lucky; that his health held and Everyman’s didn’t. But Howie has also led what would appear an exemplary life and was a constant of decency in the central character’s. “His first love affair had been with his brother…The one solid thing throughout his life had been his admiration for this very good man. He’d made a mess of all his marriages, but throughout their adult lives he and his brother had been truly constant.” At least until our hero can’t countenance his brother’s constancy any longer. Everyman may be no moralist, and Roth hardly a writer to spin homilies, yet our central character has left wives and taken up lovers and has two sons who resented him deserting their mother. If his life had only one wife and one daughter in it — Nancy, who made all the funeral arrangements and whom he always adored and who was equally fond of him — his life might have looked a success, no matter the frequent hospitalisations. That Roth shapes his novel not only around the various ops, but also around Everyman’s marriages and his love affairs, leaves the reader to wonder what comment is being made through the novel’s two key elements. There may be other details (the father’s jewellery shop; Nancy’s single parenting, and Everyman’s painting and painting classes) but the bulk of the novel is on infirmity and infidelity, on falling apart and failing to keep away from sexual temptation. 

       Ben Schermbrucker reckons, “in Everyman, human lives seem to end pitifully, inspiring neither comfort nor resolution for the bereaved. Indeed, the psychological ambience of the whole novel suggests that people have an implicit awareness that they are stranded in a world without a metaphysical horizon…” (Philip Roth Studies) This is a fair claim, with only Howie escaping this pitifulness, as though he might be able to allow himself a metaphysical horizon (Tibet?) unaware that it is predicated on the good fortune of physical health. Almost all the other characters are or end up in a dismal condition. Everyman is far from alone in coping with the corporeal catastrophe. A talented elderly artist in his painting class is in so much pain that “…it overrides everything…I think sometimes I can’t go another hour” she tells the central character. Ten days later she kills herself with an overdose of sleeping pills.” (During their discussion, Everyman sees that “…she’s embarrased by what she’s become…embarrassed, humiliated, humbled almost beyond her own recognition. But which of them wasn’t?” There is Phoebe who, after a stroke, Everyman sees, and notes her beauty, “…frail to begin with, was smashed and broken, and tall as she was, under the hospital sheets, she looked shrunken and already on the way to decomposing.” Then there is the boss at the ad agency who passes away at 84 and Everyman phones his wife to offer condolences. He follows this with a call to a former work colleague who has been hospitalised with severe depression, and a further call to another colleague, who at 70 has terminal cancer. We can recall too the death of his father and of his mother, who when he sees after she has passed, reckons “what he saw was a stone, the heavy sepulchral, stonelike weight that says, Death is just death — it’s nothing more.”    

      With such a litany of affliction many might agree with Spice’s claim that it is in “certain respects [a] disagreeable novel.” (London Review of Books) It is not uncommon for a story to play up death and disease, but this is frequently contained less by preoccupation than by dramatic manifestation. Whether it is Death in Venice or The Plague, All Quiet on the Western Front or Storm of Steel,  The Leopard or The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the books focus on death because of a plague, a war or a particular demise, but Roth covers one man’s life and incorporates within it his numerous operations, his ex-wife’s stroke, both his parents’ deaths, a student’s suicide, the terminal cancer of a colleague, the demise of his boss — and opens with the central character’s funeral. It even has a lengthy scene near the end focusing on the gravedigger who buried Everyman’s father and in turn will bury him. Everyman is a book permeated by death on almost every page. Though there are moments where the central character’s vitality is evident — when he swims and when he fornicates —these are rare indeed. The book isn’t about a life taken by death, but by death constantly taking life and the illnesses that offer foreshadowings and bodily weakenings. Yet if at moments he hates his brother it rests on how oblivious Howie seems to be to this fragility: “But now he hated him and he envied him and he was poisonously jealous of him and, in his thoughts, all but rose up in rage against him because the force that Howie brought to bear on life had in no way been impeded.”

     In a 1974 interview with Joyce Carol Oates, Roth said, “to my mind it is Bellow in his last two pain-filled novels, who has sounded the theme of loss…regret for the loss, and…ironic ‘acceptance’ of the regret…” but here we have Roth — one of the funniest postwar novelists, eschewing the irony, and offering death as a straight whisky, untempered by water or ice. Is this Roth’s direct statement on death and indisposition, no longer willing to wrap the human condition up in the garb of the comedic (though there are funny passages, or is the book seeking a form to make clear that too many works offers life only occasionally punctuated by death, or a spiritual containment that gives life and death its shape? Roth never had any time for belief beyond the material reality of our existence. It is there in Everyman’s remark about his mother’s corpse, and often enough in interviews. As he said to CBS, “when the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.” Roth, however, was always suspicious of claims writers make beyond the text. “The intelligence of even the most intelligent novelist is often debased, and at least distorted, when it’s isolated from the novel that embodies it; without intending to, it addresses the mind alone rather than suffusing a wider consciousness…detached from the fiction, a novelist’s wisdom is often too much talk.” (Reading Myself and Others)

         The comic is as readily a formal choice as a consequence of sensibility: that the writing contains humour less because the writer is a funny person who wants to put comedy into the work, more the situations he explores and depicts can only be viewed from an angle that makes us laugh. Whether it is the liver used for masturbation in Portnoy’s Complaint, or another masturbatory moment when the central character is found with the photograph of a friend’s daughter in Sabbath’s Theatre, Roth creates scenarios that bring out the pathetic human condition humorously, as the species has highfalutin’ ideas of itself along with the lowness of its drives. If Roth has little interest in the theological this isn’t because his books are an attack on the notion. They are often indifferent to it: the problem rests on the body’s weaknesses in its various manifestations (from failing health to failing will; from the inevitability of ageing to the likelihood of infidelity). The humour comes out of such problems but it is not a necessary condition of them. Spice says “attempting to address his big subject with gentleness and humanity but without irony, Roth runs the risk that he will fail to take his readers with him. If we come to this novel hoping to spend time with someone usually so mercurial and interesting, we may be aghast to find him taking himself so seriously.” (London Review of Books) Spice offers it with the air of a disappointed expectation; that humour is what Roth does and any large subject is only as big as the comedic can contain. Roth has got a little above himself and left his readers languishing and low. But if we accept humour as a consequence of Roth’s preoccupations instead of seeing Roth as a comedic sensibility (like PG Wodehouse, David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury) then humour is just a sub-category of the various concerns. They can play out humorously, or without any humour at all. In Everyman, they play out without much mirth. 

          So what does Roth want to achieve with this (relatively) humourless work? We can think again of Schermbrucker noting that the novella emphasises the lack of a metaphysical horizon, and Schermbrucker contrasting Roth’s Everyman with the fifteenth-century morality play with the same name. In an interview with Martin Krasnik, Roth says: “Everyman is the name of a line of English plays from the 15th century, allegorical plays, moral theatre. The moral was always 'Work hard and get into heaven', 'Be a good Christian or go to hell’.” (Guardian) The redemptive aspect is of no interest, of course, to the writer, and two remarks Roth makes in this Guardian interview can be helpful. Roth talks about a writer who died in the mid-to-late nineties in New York. “He had girlfriends, mistresses. And at this memorial ceremony there were all these women. Of all ages. And they all cried and left the room, because they couldn't stand it. That was the greatest tribute ..." He also says, “for years I had decided never to think about death. I have seen people die, of course, my parents, but it wasn't until a good friend of mine died in April that I experienced it as completely devastating. He was a contemporary. It doesn't say so in the agreement I signed, I didn't see that page in the contract, you know.” (Guardian) Realisations come in many forms and not always in comedic packaging. Roth could see he was now aligned with death. It was no longer in front of him as it would have been when his parents passed away; now his contemporaries were passing away as well. 

         Before saying more about this we may have caught ourselves in a contradiction: insisting that Roth’s comments as a person are of little value while then going on to quote them as useful. But we can distinguish between statements and conditions. Saying there is no God is a statement and Roth has no more wisdom on the subject than anybody else. But finding those around him beginning to die is a condition Roth wants to explore.  His belief that there is no such thing as an afterlife except for the worms will inevitably contain the work’s horizons — and its absence of spiritual containment. Yet it is one thing to write a book insisting there is no God and another that explores that you are generationally now the first in line to go to the grave. The Dying Animal may have ironised this probability with his much younger ex-lover Consuela, the one who looks more likely to die when she gets breast cancer, but the one who does die in the book is his good friend and contemporary George O’Hearn. This is a common feature in late Roth — deaths that aren’t apparently closely connected to the novel. Tim Parks notes that “in each book [The Humbling, Exit: Ghost, Indignation, Nemesis) a close acquaintance of the central character dies unexpectedly in a way quite unconnected with the main events.” (London Review of Books) It is there in those passages in Everyman too, with the editor just dead and a colleague terminally ill. But The Dying Animal, Everyman and The Humbling aren’t statement books but condition novels. They seem less about attacking the idea of God than attacking (in the sense of exploring) what it means to be near the end of one’s life. Indignation seems to be doing something else: a book that focuses on a young man’s demise in the Korean War and does hint at statement: it brings in Bertrand Russell’s 'Why I am Not a Christian' and offers exchanges between the central character and others on God. As the narrator central character says, “I don’t need solace. I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in Prayer. Praying to me is preposterous.” When his interlocutor says, “and yet so many millions do it,” the narrator replies, “millions once thought the earth was flat, sir.” 

       This appears closer to the intelligence of the novelist at work in the fiction that Roth warns against; that a writer’s purpose isn’t to make statements but to explore conditions: what it means to be a dying animal. We wouldn’t assume that Everyman is right when he says he hated his brother’s good health, and might be relieved when he says “he did not retain for long the spiteful desire for his brother to lose his health”, if for no better reason than his brother losing his life wouldn’t allow Everyman to regain his own. Envy here is understandable, but it isn’t useful, and Roth isn’t expressing a value through this claim. He isn’t proposing what he believes as one might assume in reading the above passage from Indignation. To say you have decided no longer to feel envious of your bother’s good health because it isn’t going to make any difference to your well-being, is good sense — but it is hardly the examination nor explanation of a value. To say that he stopped doing so aware that such thoughts were mean and self-centred would have been to produce a statement but also a platitude. By focusing on conditions, we can see precisely why Everyman would start hating his brother, and Roth’s job isn’t to say whether this is good or bad  — but see it as both tempting and futile.  Spice reckons “we expect the novel to crack up, to corpse, but it keeps a dismayingly straight face. Puzzlement may then turn to flippancy, flippancy to restlessness and restlessness to outright irritation. What at first struck me as odd, seemed tedious on second reading, and I began to think, pace Berryman, ‘Roth, friends, is boring. We must not say so.” (London Review of Books) 

       Spice conflates character, situation and author, while it is more useful as much as possible to keep this distinct, with Roth finding in his character’s predicament little to laugh about so why make it funny? There are some wry moments but usually these come from Everyman getting just enough perspective on himself to see the absurdity on certain occasions. He sees a woman probably in her late twenties jogging by. He would unfailingly wave and determines to talk to her. One day he manages and tries repeatedly to prevent his gaze from arriving at her breasts, and while seeing the stupid thrill her presence gives him, is surprised after he says he noticed her jogging that she noticed him noticing her. She works for an ad agency in Philadelphia and is impressed when he tells her who he used to work for as they chat for a few minutes. He gives her his number but she doesn’t call and changes her running route. It could have been an encounter played for the most pathetic of laughs but Roth offers pathos instead, balancing the possible sense of male entitlement, that humour might have been used to undermine, with a feeling for the self-aware absurdity of the central character’s predicament. There he is without any of the virility of his earlier days yet still with the cravings that he can no longer expect to meet.  As he says, “thirty years ago he wouldn’t have doubted the result of pursuing her, young as she was, and the possibility of humiliating rejection would never have occurred to him.”. This could just be another form of entitlement, but we might read it more as a man who isn’t so much boasting about his past successes but exaggerating the gap between his younger days and his present predicament. His attempt to seduce the young woman is almost as futile as hating his brother, but what both illustrate is a hopelessness that is also hapless, without quite becoming humorous. To make more of his seduction attempt as comedy may have given it more of a value — older men shouldn’t be hitting on young women. But Roth wants to point up the useless paradox of desire’s presence within a body that is no longer capable of being an object of attraction to what it is attracted towards, and no longer a functioning one possessing the virility of his younger years. 

          If few books are so completely structured around illness and death, and fewer still offer such a foreshadowing in the very cover, Everyman doesn't just offer death as subject and design, it also offers an epigraph of Keats’s: “Here, where men sit and hear each other groan/Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs/Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies/Where but to think is to be full of sorrow.” Add to this a structure that opens with the funeral of the man the book will be about, and all but ends on a lengthy discussion in the cemetery between Everyman and the gravedigger, who can doubt the book insistently focuses on making darkness visible, without making it palatable. It may be a disappointingly humourless book for some, but it is surely first and foremost a work about a disappointed man: someone who ruins his second marriage, fails to have a warm relationship with two of his kids, who lives for good health but fails in his latter years to hold on to it, and even his dream of having plenty of time to continue his youthful artistic ambitions falls away. Everyman isn’t quite claiming that his ill health is associated with his regrets, but what else is he to do but fall into rumination when his body will no longer keep him up and active and thinking about other things?  

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Everyman

Without Metaphysical Horizon

       Like The Humbling and The Dying Animal, Everyman can be seen as a late, short Philip Roth novel that tarries with death, doom, despair and other words that bleakly begin with d. The Jonathan Cape hardcover couldn’t be less inviting: all black except for the white of the title a third of the way down, and, in white too, Philip Roth’s name, twice the size of the title, near the bottom. It also has the faintest of reddish brown lines framing the first two-thirds of the cover but the point is a dark bluntness and the awareness that if the character is potentially an everyman, the writer is not. 

     The title belongs not just to the unnamed central character, but also to the father’s jewellery shop, a store offering decent deals for customers who want good quality rings and necklaces but don't always have the money. “He never checked their credit, as long as he got his cost out of it, they could come in afterwards and pay a few dollars more a week, even nothing, and he really didn’t care. He never went broke with credit, and the goodwill generated by his flexibility was more than worth it.” The reflection on his father’s life comes after the family has just buried him and the protagonist looks back on his own as he conjures up his father’s. Yet, while the father dies a few years before him in time, his death comes after the protagonist’s in the narrative, with the book opening and closing on our hero’s demise. If it is contained by these two funerals, while invoking other deaths as well, it is punctuated by the various operations the protagonist undergoes throughout his life. As Nicholas Spice notes: “the basic narrative of Everyman is a chronological sequence: the history of the protagonist’s illnesses, hospital stays and operations since he was a boy. The dates are precise: 1942, aged nine – hernia operation; 1967, aged 34 – burst appendix; 1989, aged 56 – quintuple bypass surgery; 1998, aged 65 – operation to remove obstruction to the renal artery.”  (London Review of Books) 

      The book earns the sombre hue of its cover, and though Spice reckons Everyman a “brief, disconsolate and in certain respects disagreeable novel” that lacks the humour and energy evident in most of Roth’s work, it can seem an example of late style if we think of the opening lines of Edward Said’s book On Late Style. “The relationship between bodily condition and aesthetic style seems at first to be a subject so irrelevant and perhaps even trivial by comparison with the momentousness of life, mortality, medical science, and health, as to be quickly dismissed. Nevertheless, my contention is as follows: all of us, by virtue of the simple fact of being conscious, are involved in constantly thinking about and making something of our lives, self-making being one of the bases of history, which according to Ibn Khaldun and Vico, the great founders of the science of history is essentially the product of human labor.” Roth's book can be viewed as the failed attempt to make that life, and the body failing as well to remain healthy. Unlike his elder brother Howie he hasn’t made a fortune ($20m), nor, like his brother, has he had a long and successful marriage. He didn’t devote himself to art either, instead making a very decent but relatively modest income in advertising. The book examines the twofold failure of his life and his body as he can't but envy his brother’s robust health, marriage and fortune. 

     Yet the book could never have been called envy for there is no enmity between these brothers, only a lack of communication near the end of it that the reader becomes privy to as a detail early on and as a motivation later on. “We spoke on the phone whenever we could, though near the end of his life”, Howie says, “he cut himself off from me for some reason that was never clear.” What becomes clear to us halfway through the book is that the central character became cold towards him. “The reason was ridiculous. He hated Howie because of his robust good health. He hated Howie because he’d never in his life been a patient in a hospital, because disease was known to him, because nowhere was his body scarred from the surgical knife, nor were there six metal stents lodged in his arteries along with a cardiac alarm system trucked into the wall of his chest that was called a defibrillator…” One is unlikely to take this seriously as hate, the sort of enviable hatred Martin Amis and Michel Houellebecq often traffic in their work and perhaps paradoxically provides much of the humour found in it. (They take hate so seriously it becomes funny.) 

It is instead despair in need of a subject and the contrast between the two brothers is pronounced, thus who better than Howie to feel the injustices of life at work? They are from the same genetic stock after all, and Howie six years his senior but there he is an ongoing specimen of ill health whose brother, at the protagonist’s funeral, “still appeared as if he could run a football through the middle of the line, and he was seventy-seven years old.” Howie has never been hospitalised and Roth’s novel is structured around the very fact that the protagonist often has been, a point not only Spice makes but Roth himself. “The subject is really illness. In fact, It isn't just about aging. My method was to trace the history of this man's illnesses from the time he's a child. So, in a certain way it's a medical biography. You know, doctors have these dossiers on us, in which they have all our illnesses listed, and this is that doctor's dossier from the other side. It's the patient's dossier, really.” (NPR)

      Our central character hates the injustice of his condition and finds its most fruitful antithesis in his brother. While in reality there may be a problem with drawing connections between life and ill health, with the patient in danger of being blamed for the misfortunes that befall them, fiction is more inclined as it looks for a justifiable causality to associate character with predicament. The best of them will see this isn’t cause and effect but will at least carry within it the assumption that, what has befallen a person, and how they've lived, isn’t unconnected, with The Death of Ivan Ilyich a good example. When in Everyman the protagonist looks back on his existence, he sees how badly he seems to have lived next to Howie, and while he doesn’t regret his first divorce, he knows that he made a mess of his second marriage. If his body has increasingly let him down in his later fifties and his sixties, his body in the immediate years before then caused him problems through virility. He just couldn’t remain faithful to a woman he very much loved, whether this is the fling he embarks on in his office, or a mad affair he starts on a trip to the Caribbean with a Danish model half his age, one that he continues on the other side of the world from the States, and that will end, terribly, in marriage. It is a third that seems a bigger mistake than the first. We’re told the infidelities started before he turned fifty and maybe it took longer than he might have expected, if it were to happen at all. “…but that it took so long to happen, even after the passion had dwindled and disappeared from his marriage” surprised him almost as much as the sex he started to demand. He may not have slept with Phoebe for six years prior to the first fling with the secretary, but he would have assumed that this is the inevitable lot of contented married life.  It isn’t only that he sleeps with other women; he also lies about it as well — a correlative in almost every instance shy of an open relationship, but leaves a loving situation eventually mired by doubt and betrayal. “Why should you want to unhinge everything?” Phoebe says. "I who never doubted you, to whom it rarely occurred even to question you, and now I can never believe another word you say. I can never trust you to be truthful again.” Actually, Phoebe did doubt him, aware of the affair with the secretary, even as she only confronts him when he lies about his reason for being in Europe, where he has been with the Dane. 

           It would be wrong to say the book is an exploration of a man’s regrets correlated to his failing health, but it wouldn’t be inaccurate to see them at least partially interlinked. The book seems to propose that Howie’s good health is closely associated with his moral health while the central character’s poor moral well-being isn’t completely removed from his bodily decay. It is a dimension Susan Sontag sees in many a text, and thinks of the literary use of TB: “however much TB was blamed on poverty and insalubrious surroundings, it was still thought that a certain inner disposition was needed to contract the disease.” (Illness as Metaphor) By this reckoning, Everyman is always going to be a weak man morally and physically next to Howie, and which one leads to the other happens to be part of Roth’s enquiry. The central character has already as a small child had his tonsils removed, but the hernia operation several years later takes on a different quality, and we are told that with the development of the hernia he was worried he might have to wear a corset. “He knew of a boy at school who wore such a corset, and one of the reasons he’d told no one about the swelling was his fear that he too would have to wear a corset and reveal it to the other boys when he changed into his shorts for the gym class.” Physical vulnerability meets social vulnerability, and while in his early years his weakness next to his big brother led to seeing him as “an object of worship”, the various afflictions over many years alters the nature of that admiration.

           This would explain to Howie the inexplicable reason why Everyman cuts himself off from his brother but it probably wouldn’t quite be clear to the central character why he feels this bitterness towards Howie. When at fifty-six our hero has a quintuple bypass operation, it is Howie who suggests hiring a couple of nurses to look after him day and night, and Howie also insists on paying for them. Everyman has an affair with one of them, Maureen Mrazek, a woman whose patients had a habit of falling in love with her and sometimes this was reciprocated. But whatever she had with Everyman was meaningful enough for her to show up more than a decade later at his funeral. He would seem to owe his brother a lot and yet there he is hardly able to contact him except when in a moment of desperation he tries to get in touch, with the idea that he might be able to live with him and his wife on their huge Santa Barbara ranch. Our hero gets one of the kids on the phone; his father and his mother are off in Tibet. There he is a man where “not a year went by when he wasn’t hospitalized” and his brother is travelling to places Everyman didn’t know you could visit. “Are Westerners allowed in Tibet?” he asks his brother’s son. His brother can still think of enlightenment, perhaps; our hero is left with the void. “It was time to worry about oblivion.”

         He could just assume that Howie was lucky; that his health held and Everyman’s didn’t. But Howie has also led what would appear an exemplary life and was a constant of decency in the central character’s. “His first love affair had been with his brother…The one solid thing throughout his life had been his admiration for this very good man. He’d made a mess of all his marriages, but throughout their adult lives he and his brother had been truly constant.” At least until our hero can’t countenance his brother’s constancy any longer. Everyman may be no moralist, and Roth hardly a writer to spin homilies, yet our central character has left wives and taken up lovers and has two sons who resented him deserting their mother. If his life had only one wife and one daughter in it — Nancy, who made all the funeral arrangements and whom he always adored and who was equally fond of him — his life might have looked a success, no matter the frequent hospitalisations. That Roth shapes his novel not only around the various ops, but also around Everyman’s marriages and his love affairs, leaves the reader to wonder what comment is being made through the novel’s two key elements. There may be other details (the father’s jewellery shop; Nancy’s single parenting, and Everyman’s painting and painting classes) but the bulk of the novel is on infirmity and infidelity, on falling apart and failing to keep away from sexual temptation. 

       Ben Schermbrucker reckons, “in Everyman, human lives seem to end pitifully, inspiring neither comfort nor resolution for the bereaved. Indeed, the psychological ambience of the whole novel suggests that people have an implicit awareness that they are stranded in a world without a metaphysical horizon…” (Philip Roth Studies) This is a fair claim, with only Howie escaping this pitifulness, as though he might be able to allow himself a metaphysical horizon (Tibet?) unaware that it is predicated on the good fortune of physical health. Almost all the other characters are or end up in a dismal condition. Everyman is far from alone in coping with the corporeal catastrophe. A talented elderly artist in his painting class is in so much pain that “…it overrides everything…I think sometimes I can’t go another hour” she tells the central character. Ten days later she kills herself with an overdose of sleeping pills.” (During their discussion, Everyman sees that “…she’s embarrased by what she’s become…embarrassed, humiliated, humbled almost beyond her own recognition. But which of them wasn’t?” There is Phoebe who, after a stroke, Everyman sees, and notes her beauty, “…frail to begin with, was smashed and broken, and tall as she was, under the hospital sheets, she looked shrunken and already on the way to decomposing.” Then there is the boss at the ad agency who passes away at 84 and Everyman phones his wife to offer condolences. He follows this with a call to a former work colleague who has been hospitalised with severe depression, and a further call to another colleague, who at 70 has terminal cancer. We can recall too the death of his father and of his mother, who when he sees after she has passed, reckons “what he saw was a stone, the heavy sepulchral, stonelike weight that says, Death is just death — it’s nothing more.”    

      With such a litany of affliction many might agree with Spice’s claim that it is in “certain respects [a] disagreeable novel.” (London Review of Books) It is not uncommon for a story to play up death and disease, but this is frequently contained less by preoccupation than by dramatic manifestation. Whether it is Death in Venice or The Plague, All Quiet on the Western Front or Storm of Steel,  The Leopard or The Death of Ivan Ilyich, the books focus on death because of a plague, a war or a particular demise, but Roth covers one man’s life and incorporates within it his numerous operations, his ex-wife’s stroke, both his parents’ deaths, a student’s suicide, the terminal cancer of a colleague, the demise of his boss — and opens with the central character’s funeral. It even has a lengthy scene near the end focusing on the gravedigger who buried Everyman’s father and in turn will bury him. Everyman is a book permeated by death on almost every page. Though there are moments where the central character’s vitality is evident — when he swims and when he fornicates —these are rare indeed. The book isn’t about a life taken by death, but by death constantly taking life and the illnesses that offer foreshadowings and bodily weakenings. Yet if at moments he hates his brother it rests on how oblivious Howie seems to be to this fragility: “But now he hated him and he envied him and he was poisonously jealous of him and, in his thoughts, all but rose up in rage against him because the force that Howie brought to bear on life had in no way been impeded.”

     In a 1974 interview with Joyce Carol Oates, Roth said, “to my mind it is Bellow in his last two pain-filled novels, who has sounded the theme of loss…regret for the loss, and…ironic ‘acceptance’ of the regret…” but here we have Roth — one of the funniest postwar novelists, eschewing the irony, and offering death as a straight whisky, untempered by water or ice. Is this Roth’s direct statement on death and indisposition, no longer willing to wrap the human condition up in the garb of the comedic (though there are funny passages, or is the book seeking a form to make clear that too many works offers life only occasionally punctuated by death, or a spiritual containment that gives life and death its shape? Roth never had any time for belief beyond the material reality of our existence. It is there in Everyman’s remark about his mother’s corpse, and often enough in interviews. As he said to CBS, “when the whole world doesn't believe in God, it'll be a great place.” Roth, however, was always suspicious of claims writers make beyond the text. “The intelligence of even the most intelligent novelist is often debased, and at least distorted, when it’s isolated from the novel that embodies it; without intending to, it addresses the mind alone rather than suffusing a wider consciousness…detached from the fiction, a novelist’s wisdom is often too much talk.” (Reading Myself and Others)

         The comic is as readily a formal choice as a consequence of sensibility: that the writing contains humour less because the writer is a funny person who wants to put comedy into the work, more the situations he explores and depicts can only be viewed from an angle that makes us laugh. Whether it is the liver used for masturbation in Portnoy’s Complaint, or another masturbatory moment when the central character is found with the photograph of a friend’s daughter in Sabbath’s Theatre, Roth creates scenarios that bring out the pathetic human condition humorously, as the species has highfalutin’ ideas of itself along with the lowness of its drives. If Roth has little interest in the theological this isn’t because his books are an attack on the notion. They are often indifferent to it: the problem rests on the body’s weaknesses in its various manifestations (from failing health to failing will; from the inevitability of ageing to the likelihood of infidelity). The humour comes out of such problems but it is not a necessary condition of them. Spice says “attempting to address his big subject with gentleness and humanity but without irony, Roth runs the risk that he will fail to take his readers with him. If we come to this novel hoping to spend time with someone usually so mercurial and interesting, we may be aghast to find him taking himself so seriously.” (London Review of Books) Spice offers it with the air of a disappointed expectation; that humour is what Roth does and any large subject is only as big as the comedic can contain. Roth has got a little above himself and left his readers languishing and low. But if we accept humour as a consequence of Roth’s preoccupations instead of seeing Roth as a comedic sensibility (like PG Wodehouse, David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury) then humour is just a sub-category of the various concerns. They can play out humorously, or without any humour at all. In Everyman, they play out without much mirth. 

          So what does Roth want to achieve with this (relatively) humourless work? We can think again of Schermbrucker noting that the novella emphasises the lack of a metaphysical horizon, and Schermbrucker contrasting Roth’s Everyman with the fifteenth-century morality play with the same name. In an interview with Martin Krasnik, Roth says: “Everyman is the name of a line of English plays from the 15th century, allegorical plays, moral theatre. The moral was always 'Work hard and get into heaven', 'Be a good Christian or go to hell’.” (Guardian) The redemptive aspect is of no interest, of course, to the writer, and two remarks Roth makes in this Guardian interview can be helpful. Roth talks about a writer who died in the mid-to-late nineties in New York. “He had girlfriends, mistresses. And at this memorial ceremony there were all these women. Of all ages. And they all cried and left the room, because they couldn't stand it. That was the greatest tribute ..." He also says, “for years I had decided never to think about death. I have seen people die, of course, my parents, but it wasn't until a good friend of mine died in April that I experienced it as completely devastating. He was a contemporary. It doesn't say so in the agreement I signed, I didn't see that page in the contract, you know.” (Guardian) Realisations come in many forms and not always in comedic packaging. Roth could see he was now aligned with death. It was no longer in front of him as it would have been when his parents passed away; now his contemporaries were passing away as well. 

         Before saying more about this we may have caught ourselves in a contradiction: insisting that Roth’s comments as a person are of little value while then going on to quote them as useful. But we can distinguish between statements and conditions. Saying there is no God is a statement and Roth has no more wisdom on the subject than anybody else. But finding those around him beginning to die is a condition Roth wants to explore.  His belief that there is no such thing as an afterlife except for the worms will inevitably contain the work’s horizons — and its absence of spiritual containment. Yet it is one thing to write a book insisting there is no God and another that explores that you are generationally now the first in line to go to the grave. The Dying Animal may have ironised this probability with his much younger ex-lover Consuela, the one who looks more likely to die when she gets breast cancer, but the one who does die in the book is his good friend and contemporary George O’Hearn. This is a common feature in late Roth — deaths that aren’t apparently closely connected to the novel. Tim Parks notes that “in each book [The Humbling, Exit: Ghost, Indignation, Nemesis) a close acquaintance of the central character dies unexpectedly in a way quite unconnected with the main events.” (London Review of Books) It is there in those passages in Everyman too, with the editor just dead and a colleague terminally ill. But The Dying Animal, Everyman and The Humbling aren’t statement books but condition novels. They seem less about attacking the idea of God than attacking (in the sense of exploring) what it means to be near the end of one’s life. Indignation seems to be doing something else: a book that focuses on a young man’s demise in the Korean War and does hint at statement: it brings in Bertrand Russell’s 'Why I am Not a Christian' and offers exchanges between the central character and others on God. As the narrator central character says, “I don’t need solace. I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in Prayer. Praying to me is preposterous.” When his interlocutor says, “and yet so many millions do it,” the narrator replies, “millions once thought the earth was flat, sir.” 

       This appears closer to the intelligence of the novelist at work in the fiction that Roth warns against; that a writer’s purpose isn’t to make statements but to explore conditions: what it means to be a dying animal. We wouldn’t assume that Everyman is right when he says he hated his brother’s good health, and might be relieved when he says “he did not retain for long the spiteful desire for his brother to lose his health”, if for no better reason than his brother losing his life wouldn’t allow Everyman to regain his own. Envy here is understandable, but it isn’t useful, and Roth isn’t expressing a value through this claim. He isn’t proposing what he believes as one might assume in reading the above passage from Indignation. To say you have decided no longer to feel envious of your bother’s good health because it isn’t going to make any difference to your well-being, is good sense — but it is hardly the examination nor explanation of a value. To say that he stopped doing so aware that such thoughts were mean and self-centred would have been to produce a statement but also a platitude. By focusing on conditions, we can see precisely why Everyman would start hating his brother, and Roth’s job isn’t to say whether this is good or bad  — but see it as both tempting and futile.  Spice reckons “we expect the novel to crack up, to corpse, but it keeps a dismayingly straight face. Puzzlement may then turn to flippancy, flippancy to restlessness and restlessness to outright irritation. What at first struck me as odd, seemed tedious on second reading, and I began to think, pace Berryman, ‘Roth, friends, is boring. We must not say so.” (London Review of Books) 

       Spice conflates character, situation and author, while it is more useful as much as possible to keep this distinct, with Roth finding in his character’s predicament little to laugh about so why make it funny? There are some wry moments but usually these come from Everyman getting just enough perspective on himself to see the absurdity on certain occasions. He sees a woman probably in her late twenties jogging by. He would unfailingly wave and determines to talk to her. One day he manages and tries repeatedly to prevent his gaze from arriving at her breasts, and while seeing the stupid thrill her presence gives him, is surprised after he says he noticed her jogging that she noticed him noticing her. She works for an ad agency in Philadelphia and is impressed when he tells her who he used to work for as they chat for a few minutes. He gives her his number but she doesn’t call and changes her running route. It could have been an encounter played for the most pathetic of laughs but Roth offers pathos instead, balancing the possible sense of male entitlement, that humour might have been used to undermine, with a feeling for the self-aware absurdity of the central character’s predicament. There he is without any of the virility of his earlier days yet still with the cravings that he can no longer expect to meet.  As he says, “thirty years ago he wouldn’t have doubted the result of pursuing her, young as she was, and the possibility of humiliating rejection would never have occurred to him.”. This could just be another form of entitlement, but we might read it more as a man who isn’t so much boasting about his past successes but exaggerating the gap between his younger days and his present predicament. His attempt to seduce the young woman is almost as futile as hating his brother, but what both illustrate is a hopelessness that is also hapless, without quite becoming humorous. To make more of his seduction attempt as comedy may have given it more of a value — older men shouldn’t be hitting on young women. But Roth wants to point up the useless paradox of desire’s presence within a body that is no longer capable of being an object of attraction to what it is attracted towards, and no longer a functioning one possessing the virility of his younger years. 

          If few books are so completely structured around illness and death, and fewer still offer such a foreshadowing in the very cover, Everyman doesn't just offer death as subject and design, it also offers an epigraph of Keats’s: “Here, where men sit and hear each other groan/Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs/Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies/Where but to think is to be full of sorrow.” Add to this a structure that opens with the funeral of the man the book will be about, and all but ends on a lengthy discussion in the cemetery between Everyman and the gravedigger, who can doubt the book insistently focuses on making darkness visible, without making it palatable. It may be a disappointingly humourless book for some, but it is surely first and foremost a work about a disappointed man: someone who ruins his second marriage, fails to have a warm relationship with two of his kids, who lives for good health but fails in his latter years to hold on to it, and even his dream of having plenty of time to continue his youthful artistic ambitions falls away. Everyman isn’t quite claiming that his ill health is associated with his regrets, but what else is he to do but fall into rumination when his body will no longer keep him up and active and thinking about other things?  


© Tony McKibbin