Philip Roth is considered by some to be the finest American novelist of the last 25 years. In his latest book, Everyman, he reflects on old age, sickness and death.
The main character is never named " he is the "everyman' of the title. The book begins at his funeral, then flashes back and forward to key moments in his life, with a focus on his final years. It is not an attractive life " three failed marriages, multiple infidelities, two estranged sons and a retirement lacking meaning and satisfaction.
It was the description of old age that I found especially notable. Everyman moves into a retirement village, where he finds health, hospitals and past glories to be the main subjects of conversation. Roth expertly takes us into the world of the aged. Some of the passages are superbly insightful:
“Lie there until it starts to work,” he said. “Then come join the class.”
“I do apologize for all this,” she said as he was leaving. “It’s just that pain makes you so alone.” And here the fortitude gave way again and left her sobbing into her hands. “It’s so shameful.”
“There’s nothing shameful about it.”
“There is, there is,” she wept. “The not being able to look after oneself, the pathetic need to be comforted. . .”
“In the circumstances, none of that is remotely shameful.”
“You’re wrong. You don’t know. 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.”
She’s embarrassed by what she’s become, he thought, embarrassed, humiliated, humbled almost beyond her own recognition. But which of them wasn’t? They were all embarrassed by what they’d become. Wasn’t he?
There are pages spent describing hospital visits and operations and medications and the other various indignities of old age. In the hands of an unskilled author it would be excruciating. But Roth is expert in his craft, and I found the novel completely absorbing.
I was also struck by Everyman’s marital infidelities. These are described in fairly explicit detail, though the writing is clinical rather than erotic. Reflecting on these in retirement, he can clearly see how much damage they have caused, and he sees them as the chief agent of his present loneliness. At the same time he feels they were somehow inevitable, that he was powerless to act in any other way, to be other than himself. There is some insight into sin there.
But the Everyman wouldn’t call it sin. He is convinced that God is “a fiction”, and that nothing lays beyond death except oblivion. And it is this atheism that makes his final years even more terrible, and his aloneness so complete. All he has is his own deteriorating health and the increasingly traumatic procedures being used to stave off the inevitable end. It is a very bleak existence, and it’s possible that this book could be an antidote to some of the more triumphant visions of atheism being promoted today.
In this respect he truly is the ‘everyman’. He is alienated from God, and this alienation leaves him in despair, facing death and the judgment beyond. Many of those who read this book will be on the same path, as are many of our friends and relatives. Everyman shows how urgent and important it is that they find the ‘better way’ before the end.
