Aegis 2011
90
Book Review >>> Justin McAtee
Everyman Philip Roth. New York: Vintage International, 2007. 182 pp.
When the septuagenarian protagonist of Roth’s Everyman joins a seaside retirement community along the New Jersey shore, he does so by a promise made to himself immediately following the 9/11 attacks: to leave vulnerable Manhattan behind, along with all the anxieties of destruction that have made the city distasteful to him in his newly-reckoned old age. In idyllic Starfish Village, the Everyman hopes to reinvigorate the optimism and vigor of his working years through keeping company with some five-hundred affluent and elderly exemplars of well-adjusted old age, and thereby discovering that he too, a lonely old artist, might have the privilege of waiting for death with some semblance of inner peace. However, the Everyman soon discovers that his new neighbors can offer no consolation or distraction from mortality. Rather, they demonstrate a preoccupation with the worries of the dying body, “their personal biographies having by this time become identical with their medical biographies” (80). Such is the stylistic and thematic character of Everyman, a biographical account detailing one man’s emotional relationship to death as told through the language of his flesh. Its 180-odd pages form a detailed and compassionate account of the struggle to maintain against final disintegration those organic operations and urges that comprise the first, and last, temple to selfhood. Roth’s short novel occupies a quintessentially modern setting, and from this familiar space conducts its articulation of the dying process, the title character evoking a palpable present-day Americana. The Everyman is a financially prosperous, non-religious, white-collar urbanite, and conceives his identity in strictly secular terms. His Jewish heritage lies discarded with the generation of immigrants who raised him, part of an obsolete past. He chooses to define himself, rather, by the shared meanings of a newer age. “[Holding] no grudge against either the limitations or comforts of conformity” (32), he becomes the follower of a distinctly present-day American Dream: He establishes a life free from illusions of posterity and religion in a secure, affluent world, believing in the virtues of building wealth, raising a family, and loving vigorously. Greatest among these is love, which grows from the very center of the Everyman’s world: his own body. Interwoven with his anxiety over a failing heart is the desperate sexual yearning that struggles to defy the heralds of death as they grow louder throughout the novel. Becoming increasingly strained through the succession of terrifying surgeries and passionate liaisons, mortal anxiety and sexual yearning become a single desperate plea for more life, until, in the novel’s twilight, the immediate pain--physical and emotional--of the dying body renders all else an “otherness,” a lost life (130). The novel’s sense of the “otherness” experienced in death is articulated in a particularly poignant scene, and exemplifies the author’s empathic capability: The dying Millicent
