Everyman – Justin McAtee

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

Kramer tells the Everyman, who comforts her upon his bed, “It’s just that pain makes you so alone. The dependence, the helplessness, the isolation, the dread--it’s all so ghastly and shameful. The pain makes you frightened of yourself. The utter otherness of it is awful” (91). Roth possesses a historical and social consciousness to match his powerful combination of compassion and imagination. Although the novel comprises not the slightest moral or political message, it is acutely aware of the time, which functions as a central motif (the Everyman’s father was a watchmaker, and watches were the son’s first boyhood passion), and is associated with the aforementioned theme of identity. The life of the Everyman is framed by two of the defining traumas in recent American memory: WWII and 9/11. These two events create a sense of collective consciousness against which the Everyman’s lifelong relationship with death can be read as reflective of that experienced by his society. The first encounter with mortality occurs at age nine, when, wading in the breakers along the New Jersey coastline, he bumps into the bloated body of a drowned German sailor, washed ashore from some distant torpedoed submarine. It is 1942, and WWII has been raging in imaginary realms, but suddenly feels menacingly close. Later that year, the young Everyman must be whisked to the hospital for an operation on an abdominal hernia, where, confined to a prison-like room with another boy who dies in the night, he experiences “a register of a death” even closer than the first (27). Sixty years later, the Everyman’s retirement coincides with the destruction of the Twin Towers. The collapse of several sections of his arterial wall soon follow, and the mortality of an aging, non-religious, white collar, urban American Citizen reasserts itself more unmistakably than ever. This is the landscape of Roth’s novel: a hyper-aware modern America where even the most ordinary, stable, and secure denizen cannot forget that he, too, will die. Why read Everyman, then? What does it have to tell us that we don’t already know, or think we know about life, love, and death? Perhaps the answer is best found through another question: Why has Roth, an affluent, agnostic Jewish-American, raised on the Jersey shore, written this book at age seventy-one (precisely the same age at which his protagonist dies)? Everyman is an evocation of universal anxiety and desire told in a voice that is startlingly familiar, disturbingly near. The novel is a reckoning, a facing-up, an unsentimental and subtle, stoic and tearless account of a most common fate.