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Letting Go
A Review by James Wood

Philip Roth's new novel is about death and dying, and about that long disease, life. It is trivially haunted by its near-namesake, the medieval mystery play, and substantially haunted by the canonical fiction about dying, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Like the hero of Tolstoy's novella, whose life was "most ordinary and therefore most terrible," the nameless protagonist of Everyman is "an average human being," a regular integer.

Like Ivan Ilyich, Roth's universal victim is blindly healthy until the age of thirty-four, when what Tolstoy called "It" makes its appearance: "He lost his appetite and his energy and found himself nauseated throughout the day, and he could not walk a city block without feeling weak and woozy." He is suffering from a burst appendix. (Ivan's fatal sickness likewise begins as a pain in the side.) He recovers, and twenty-two average years pass, "twenty-two years spared the adversary that is illness and the calamity that waits in the wings. As he'd reassured himself while walking under the stars on the Vineyard with Phoebe, he would worry about oblivion when he was seventy-five." But at the age of fifty-six, death begins to swarm over him: he feels breathless, his coronary artery is blocked, and he must have bypass surgery. Thus begin fifteen years of heart-related travails, which will see him to his relatively early demise at the age of seventy-one.

Like Tolstoy, Roth is interested in the clinical shawl with which medical language covers illness. For Tolstoy, nineteenth-century medicine is an obvious sham, with its talk of "floating kidneys" and the like, and doctors are introduced only to be mocked. For Roth, modern medicine works until it does not, at which point its professionalized discourses look like flimsy stays, languages made untranslatable by death's undiscovered country. So this book is full of talk about stents and quintuple bypasses and renal artery obstructions and carotid endarterectomies, and Roth takes pleasure in forcing this language to share lexical premises with death: "I must, I must, he thought, my six stents tell me I must one day soon fearlessly say goodbye." Life becomes so overwhelmed by the vocabulary of sickness and its medical repair that life is itself sick: "He'd married three times, had mistresses and children and an interesting job where he'd been a success, but now eluding death seemed to have become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story."

In a telling reversal, religion, which is so massively significant for Tolstoy, is for Roth the equivalent of nineteenth-century medicine -- an obvious fraudulence, nothing more than optimistic shamanism. In this respect, Roth's novella puts me in mind of Philip Larkin's great secular poem about the terror of death, "Aubade," which similarly writes off the consolations of religion, "That vast moth-eaten musical brocade/Created to pretend we never die":

Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life, and he found all religions offensive, considered their superstitious folderol meaningless, childish, couldn't stand the complete unadultness. ... No hocus-pocus about death and God or obsolete fantasies of heaven for him. There was only our bodies, born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us.

But Roth's novella is most like Tolstoy's in its relentless didacticism. You must listen to the news I bring, both writers are saying; you must absorb it, you must change your life. Both books can make us feel that we are being bludgeoned into apprehension. Everyman begins with the funeral of the victim, and then reverses itself in order to tell his complete life story. Thematically, both novellas are centripetal, monologic: Roth continually reverts to "the adversary that is illness and the calamity that waits in the wings." Roth's protagonist first feels, as a young man walking on Martha's Vineyard, that the profusion of the stars tell him "unambiguously that he was doomed to die," and he fearfully resists this idea, for the blackness beneath the ocean "made him want to run from the menace of oblivion to their cozy, lighted, underfurnished house." After a successful career in advertising, he leaves New York City -- chased out by the attacks of September 11 -- and settles in a retirement community on the beloved Jersey Shore of his childhood. There, unmarried and solitary, he is beset by loneliness and uncertainty, "hounded by the sense that he was headed for the end." Surrounded by other ailing seniors, he has limitless time to reflect on "the inevitable onslaught that is the end of life":

Had he been aware of the mortal suffering of every man and woman he happened to have known during all his years of professional life, of each one's painful story of regret and loss and stoicism, of fear and panic and isolation and dread ... and of how, systematically, they were being destroyed, he would have had to stay on the phone through the day and into the night, making another hundred calls at least. Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

Everyman is in places quite beautiful, illuminated by that fine precision and relative spareness of language that has characterized Roth's work in his late phase. Like some of that work, notably The Human Stain and American Pastoral, it starts well and ends even better, but it leaves the muddle of a middle somewhere behind it, like a sloughed skin. Long novels can survive muddle and sagging, but novellas cannot; and Everyman is a short work that does not feel compact enough. Despite some undeniably moving passages, the novella fails to gather its power: the sum of its parts is not finally as affecting as the parts themselves. Its teachings about death seem less lament than complaint, and the complaint has the rather weepy atmosphere of self-pity. In this respect, its difference from Tolstoy's very dry-eyed account of Ivan's dying is instructive.

Roth's great temptation has always been sentimentality, an indulgence apparently impossible to separate from his writing about Jewishness and his ideological investment in Jewishness. In the last decade, Newark and the Jersey Shore have been increasingly charged, in part by an appeal to a once-untouched and unadmired Jewishness, with an Edenic innocence, a charm and simple familial goodness that existed from the 1930s until the great change of the 1960s, when the neighborhoods that people like Philip Roth grew up in became less habitable for people like Philip Roth. In Sabbath's Theater, a fabulously funny and powerful work, Mickey Sabbath idolizes his elder brother Morty, "the kindest elder brother in the world," who died in World War II. Their childhood together is remembered as idyllic, Mickey's mother and father united in perfect contentment until Morty's death changes everything:

That was how content she was, immersed in everything that had to be done to keep her husband's accounts in order, to live peaceably alongside her elderly mother-in-law, to manage the daily needs of the two boys, to see to it, during even the worst of the Depression, that however little money the butter-and-egg business yielded, the budget she devised did not impinge on their happy development and that, for instance, everything handed down from Morty to Mickey, which was nearly everything Mickey wore, was impeccably patched, freshly aired, spotlessly clean. Her husband proudly proclaimed to his customers that his wife had eyes in the back of her head and two pairs of hands.

The hero of Everyman likewise reveres his athletic and successful elder brother, Howie, who is a fearless paragon, and had "played football in the fall and pole-vaulted in the spring, all the while garnering grades good enough to earn him a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania and then admission to the Wharton School to earn an MBA. ... Howie's vigor never lapsed, nor did his capacity to inspire confidence." Naturally, such a character is entirely imprisoned by these simple-minded plaudits, and seems to speak only in a version of the very sentimentality that produced him. At his younger brother's funeral, for instance, "his voice was husky with emotion when he whispered to his wife, 'My kid brother. It makes no sense.'"

The hero's father ran a jewelry store in Elizabeth called Everyman's Jewelry Store, and in the funeral eulogy that begins the book, Howie publicly recalls how his younger brother was fascinated with all the old watches brought in: "My little brother could sit there for hours, spinning the hands and listening to the watches tick, if they still did, and studying what each face and what each case looked like. That's what made that boy tick. ... How that boy loved doing everything that went along with being the jeweler's reliable son!"

The jeweler, their father, was a spotless man, too, and Everyman's Jewelry Store was a piece of paradise. Like the parents in Sabbath's Theater, they made their utterly admirable way through the Depression. Roth writes that the funeral of Howie's brother was no different from scores of others occurring that day up and down the state, except for "Howie's resurrecting with such painstaking precision the world as it innocently existed before the invention of death, life perpetual in their father-created Eden, a paradise just fifteen feet wide by forty feet deep disguised as an old-style jewelry store." This is Jewish Disney, vulgar and cartoonish, and it is hard to resist the suspicion that Roth is not much censured for it in his work because its Jewishness -- the rightful homage paid to a hardier generation, and so on -- is thought to make it somehow allowable.

Just as Howie is a monolith of monochrome, so Howie's dad speaks only in sentimentalities, in the moist conventions of middlebrow ethnic fiction. When his son, the nameless hero of the novella, is hospitalized at the age of nine for a hernia operation, he whispers fortifying consolations in the boy's ear: "You can do it, son. ... It's like when I give you an errand to run on the bus or a job to do at the store. Whatever it is, you never let me down. Reliable -- my two reliable boys! I pop my buttons when I think about my boys. Always, you do the work like the thorough, careful hard-working boys you were brought up to be." Who really speaks like this?

Of course, a character has every right to be sentimental about his own childhood, even to the point of drowning in the bath of the family romance if he wishes to. (Near death, Ivan Ilyich feels that only his childhood was good, and that the rest of his life has been a steady moving away from that golden light.) But his creator does not have the same right, and the difficulty with these passages is that Roth seems to share similar feelings. The simple-mindedness is peculiar, because it runs the risk of making Roth, so intelligent a writer, seem unhelpfully dogmatic, a divider of the world into perfect and less than perfect, innocent and corrupt, before and after.

Most crucially, it is a mistake in a novella much occupied with wailing at death, because it can make that wailing seem at times more like an illusioned complaint about the loss of Eden ("the world as it innocently existed before the invention of death") than a disillusioned lament about the end of everything. The sentimentality about childhood and the past comes very close to infecting the question of death and dying with a relative of that same sentimentality. It is horrible to die: this, the novella must teach us. But the reader will be more restive at the proposition that it is horrible to die because one's childhood was enchanted and idyllic. The first proposition is anguished, a lamentation; the second is self-pitying, a whine. And at times the novella moves uneasily between the two appeals.

The virus of sentimentality always has a way of propagating itself. The women in Roth's novella are either bitter, abandoned, or hopeless wives -- Cecilia, the hero's first wife, and Merete, his third; or they are divinely supportive angels -- Phoebe, the hero's second wife ("the very best in the way of naturalness that Quaker Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College could produce," a very characteristic Roth sentence), and a sexy nurse named Maureen whose love and vitality nurse the hero back to life, and Nancy, the hero's Cordelia-like daughter, who has apparently been ideal since conception:

He never really stopped worrying about her, nor did he understand how it happened that such a child should be his. He hadn't necessarily done the right things to make it happen, even if Phoebe had. But there are such people, spectacularly good people -- miracles, really -- and it was his great fortune that one of these miracles was his own incorruptible daughter.

The least one can say about a passage like this is that it does not sound like any plausible father, or any plausible daughter, and so it weakens our involvement in the quiddity of our everyman hero.

Sentimentality is a form of extremity, and the second great weakness of this novella is Roth's decision to push his theme to extremity, to fill his book with example after example of illness and dying and death. In the course of 182 pages, we encounter the following ailments and demises: the hero has a hernia at the age of nine and witnesses, in the hospital, the death of another child; he is hospitalized again at the age of thirty-four, with peritonitis; at fifty-six, he has his first heart surgery, followed by regular trips ever after, until his death. His father dies and then his mother dies. Phoebe has a stroke. At the retirement community, people are unwell and dying. One friend suffers from intolerable pain: "Nothing helps. I've had three operations. Each one is more extensive than the last and more harrowing than the last, and each one makes the pain worse." Her husband was vigorous until he was "felled by brain cancer." She kills herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. And just before the hero himself dies, he gets news of the fates of three colleagues: Brad Karr has been hospitalized for suicidal depression; Ezra Pollock has terminal cancer at seventy; and Clarence Spraco, suffering for years from heart trouble, dies at the age of eighty-four.

Well, what of it, Roth might say, this is what old age is like -- not a battle but a "massacre." In recent interviews, this is exactly what Roth has said, and he has mentioned that he began this book the day after attending Saul Bellow's funeral, a little more than a year ago. Old age is lonely and full of illness and death, and memorial services, as Ralph Richardson once put it, are the cocktail parties of the over-seventy set (a joke temperamentally very different from the solemn tearfulness of Everyman). This is the missionary atmosphere of Roth's book: he is reporting from a war zone, he needs to tell us what things look like now -- "an objective reading of the shit," as he put it in Sabbath's Theater. We are going to have our noses rubbed in that shit, and so be it.

The issue is not Roth's right to self-pity, but his book's. Aesthetically, it is not obvious that the best way to evoke the horror of dying is by overloading a short novella with many examples of it. The writer is trying a bit too hard; the misery overwhelms not us but the book's form, which threatens a deadening literalism. (Look, another death! And another!) An interesting didacticism becomes only propaganda. Tolstoy's novella, for different reasons having largely to do with its Christian preaching, does not avoid a similar charge of propaganda against it, so Roth is in good company; but much of the remarkable, burning power of that book has to do with the way Tolstoy keeps his gaze on a single example of dying, universalizing outward in concentric circles from that one laser-like dot of pain. Roth, by contrast, seems to want to universalize sideways, to gesture broadly and multiply from his many examples of dying and pain: not so much Everyman as Everyperson.

Tolstoy's great aesthetic advantage is his distance from Ivan, from Ivan's determination to ignore death and its implications for his life. The character resists death while the book teaches us not to resist it, and in this way works against the character. Roth's hero, by contrast, is deeply aware of death, terribly afraid of it, alerted apparently at the age of nine -- and Roth's book, because of its endless supply of examples of death, is similarly aware, similarly afraid, so that author and hero become one in the reader's mind, and again the faint keen of self-pity, rather than the properly objectified sound of lamentation, is heard. The book cries to us, "This is awful." Or perhaps, "I feel awful." But I am not sure that one should finish Everyman feeling sorry for Philip Roth just because he seems to be miserable.

To be fair, Roth's story, while mindful of Ivan Ilyich, is also attempting different things, and it would be wrong to stress only the relative weaknesses. As in other work by Roth, the same literalism that can produce sentimentality, extremity, and coarseness also produces scenes and moments and sentences that only he can bring off. It is not especially moving when Phoebe has a stroke and her former husband visits her in the hospital, trying not to cry at her battered features (pure manipulation), but it is peculiarly affecting when Roth writes that his elderly hero has taken to watching the young female joggers on the boardwalk. One day he gets into conversation with one of them, and begins to make his old seducer's moves, even as the grotesquerie of the age disparity is obvious. She seems to be interested, a phone number is exchanged, but she never runs that route 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." That final phrase, "the last great outburst of everything," is a wonderful example of all that is best in Roth's recent writing: simple, toughly musical, almost plain, but capable also of a plain lyricism: Everyman's Everything.

There is plenty of writing like this in Everyman. Along with the tough short phrases there are marvelous long sentences, winding their way around parentheses and dashes and subclauses. One such occupies almost an entire page, as the hero remembers swimming in the sea, his rib cage scraping "against the tiny sharp pebbles and jagged clamshells and pulverized seashells at the edge of the shore," the little boy so intoxicated by the taste and the salty freshness of the sea "that he was driven to the brink of biting down with his teeth to tear out a chunk of himself and savor his fleshly existence." Lonely and isolated, the retired advertising man endures the slow process of reduction that is senescence, and Roth's prose, in lovely mimicry, reduces itself too, unafraid of directness and repetition:

But now it appeared that like any number of the elderly, he was in the process of becoming less and less and would have to see his aimless days through to the end as no more than what he was -- the aimless days and the uncertain nights and the impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing. This is how it works out, he thought, this is what you could not know.

Less, aimless, waiting, days, end, no more, nothing, know: the paragraph is made of very simple units, and it is one of those moments when one feels Beckett's breath on the page, as was the case from time to time in Sabbath's Theater, Roth's other death-filled book, whose hero announces, "No, no, I'll go on to the end."

Near this end, both of Everyman and of Everyman's life, the hero visits his parents' graves. The reader braces himself for unwanted lachrymosity, prepped for it by an earlier, teary description of the hero's father's funeral ("Many of the elderly were weeping now and holding on to each other"). Roth is practical and plain at the cemetery, as the hero meets the man who dug his parents' graves, and asks him about the business of gravedigging -- how long it takes, how deep, and so on. This long sequence, in which Everyman repeatedly quizzes the gravedigger about the terms of his labor, does not exactly avoid the sentimentality it strives to escape; the literalism seems a little like a sentimentalist's idea of the strenuously anti-sentimental. Unlike the boisterous laborers of the last act of Hamlet, the African American gravedigger, ominously enough, seems to be a noble creature from the same moist club as Howie, Phoebe, Nancy, and Everyman's parents; his goodly wife even turns up with his packed lunch while the two men are talking.

Yet at the graves, the hero's dead parents are movingly practical, too, and suddenly, in an unexpected swerve, the absence of overt sentimentality is extremely affecting, in a way that is too rare, alas, in this book:

His mother had died at eighty, his father at ninety. Aloud he said to them, "I'm seventy-one. Your boy is seventy-one." "Good. You lived," his mother replied, and his father said, "Look back and atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left."

But Everyman has no time left. Admitted to the hospital for a relatively routine operation on his right carotid artery, he dies:

He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he'd feared from the start.

These are the book's last words, and they make the reader wish that the novella had found a form, a way of treating this subject in ruthless totality, as equivalently eloquent and unsentimental. That plain music is sounding again, the sentence apparently as simple as speech but in fact composed with utmost care, the words chosen for their alliterative force ("feeling far from felled") and the verbs ending with the same scything finality, felled, doomed, fulfilled: "feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up." In a previous operation, he chose a local anesthetic and regretted it. This time, he chooses a general anesthetic and never wakes up. What Larkin called "the anaesthetic from which none come round" has claimed him, too.

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