Everyman

A Morality Story

Philip Roth's first book, Goodbye, Columbus, deserves a place with The Great Gatsby and Bartleby the Scrivener among the great American novellas. The title story, about a young Jewish man from Newark, New Jersey, who dates a rich Jewish girl from the suburbs, is exquisite -- lyrical, precise, moving and, if there could be such a thing, pitched perfectly off-key. It is superior to The Great Gatsby, if only in the sense that any book about prosperous American life that does not need a gunshot to round it out is better than a book that does. Roth's story announces the intentions on which his career has made good: to discuss secular Jewish life, the growth and decay of big cities -- Newark's in particular -- the difficulty of reconciling the sex urge and the love urge over time, and the painful need to outgrow one's parents. The long novel that followed it, Letting Go (1962), takes up all of these themes again; and though it suggested the heavy influence of Saul Bellow, it proved that Roth lacked Bellow's extraordinary gift, to be exquisite in quantity. Letting Go isn't a bad book; there are other, perhaps higher, virtues than exquisiteness. And one of the things that the novel revealed is what Roth could do when he let go of his claim to finish. Scene-making, in particular, which he does so beautifully in Goodbye, Columbus, requires a certain finickiness, a too nice arrangement of setting and props, to bring out the characters' carefully chosen, subtly revealing lines. It can stop them from giving full voice to the arguments they want to have; and those are the arguments, Roth realized, he wanted to watch them fight out.

His career has had every kind of success, not least commercial; and he has had the wit to make of literary celebrity just the right kind of joke. Portnoy's Complaint (1969), which described the plight of a mother-smothered Jewish man who released his anxieties in masturbation, made him both rich and famous. One can imagine the difficulty a writer might face in following it up; and the course Roth chose revealed his great gift for accepting simply, as a novelist, the problems he has been set, and making them complicated enough. Zuckerman Unbound (1981) tells the story of a young Jewish novelist who has just had a big hit with a book about masturbation. It is very funny, but the joke is not always on him. What is most striking about that novel is the line Roth keeps between humility and arrogance. The worst thing about fame, the book suggests, is that the strong light cast by it isn't quite false: awkward truths show up in its glare. Roth's Zuckerman is not shy about his gifts as a writer, but he is just as willing to mock or question his own pretensions. Each tendency serves as ballast for the other. Among the shameful things he shows himself willing to explore is the sly shame of immodesty; a man who can write about masturbation can write about self-pride.

It is worth mentioning what a readable writer Roth is. Bellow's exquisiteness -- as seen, for example, in his masterpiece, The Adventures of Augie March -- often comes at the price of narrative drive. Why should you turn the page, he seems to ask: there is enough food for contemplation, for wisdom and pleasure, where we are now, on this page. But Roth, though every bit as serious a writer, has always had the knack of drawing his reader along. Knack is not really the word for it; readability in his hands seems to involve a deeper skill. Though he often plays narrative games, Roth has the ease with his tricks to make his storylines appear both straightforward and obvious. Drama is conflict, as the writing student learns. Roth might add, that conflict is argument. One is conscious, reading his novels, of a man who at every stage in his life has been acutely aware of the large questions he was deciding, and the large questions that were being decided for him. The faith implicit in his secular doubts is just this: that there are always arguments to be had, between husband and wife, brother and brother, father and son, mistress and lover. These arguments shift over time, but every stage of life, every change of circumstance, can be relied on to produce them. And the job of the novelist is to listen to these questions and give them a voice, if not an answer.

There is a bias here, what might be called a Jewish bias, towards eloquence in argument -that gift is the flag a personality flies to declare itself. Roth's characters, increasingly, are defined not by the rhythm of their idiosyncrasies but by the positions, intellectual and otherwise, they take up and defend. This isn't to say that they have only the general neutral qualities of characters in a morality play -- that they are Everymen and Everywomen. Their back-stories, family roots, professions, personal charms, medical histories, talents and drives, are essential to the arguments they make, and Roth has an extraordinary appetite for such details. If they speak in the same voice, this seems to matter less in his prose than it would in another writer's, because Roth's voice is capable of rendering the points and counterpoints so clearly and subtly. He does justice to difference in a language of sameness.

Of course, one cannot value argument without, on some level, taking sides. If nothing else, Roth tends to privilege the sorts of life-decisions that throw up the big questions. Adultery matters a lot to him as a writer, precisely because the decision to commit it suggests such interesting choices: between love and family and virtue on the one hand; and what might be called a more immediate honesty, on the other -- at least in respect of that vital and amoral urge to create or remake oneself that Roth considers essential to being human. He may be guilty of another bias, here, towards the male perspective. It is certainly true that his women come across in the sharpest detail only when seen through the narrowed eyes of one of his men.

Infidelity in his novels hardly ranks as one of the cardinal sins. A little bit of it, in fact, belongs properly to the conventional life of a good husband. Fidelity poses a great problem to his muse. Nobody can keep up the intensity of an argument when the answer to all the big questions, again and again, stays the same.

There is another problem with his approach, one which Roth, as a narrator, is cunning enough to make an issue out of. Writing about himself means writing about writers. How can his narrators join honestly in these arguments, when their main interest as novelists lies in making sure they get fought? "This profession even fucks up grief", his narrative alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, remarks in The Counterlife (1986), on the way to his brother's funeral. The detachment of the writer, and its sexual implications, is one of Roth's great subjects. He cannot attend any of the ceremonies of life without taking notes -- and taking pleasure from taking notes. "This profession", in Roth's books, has a corrosive influence; it eats into ordinary relationships, and it eats into the desire to form them. It fucks up not only grief but fucking, too. Zuckerman, after the success of his masturbation book, after the affairs with movie stars run dry, after the marriages fail, accepts what time and medicine have done to his sex life and drive. One of the questions he raises is whether the curiosity that replaces that drive is sufficient to sustain satisfying relations with the world; whether or not you can live, as a writer, for your work; and whether that work can have a general interest for a readership that isn't made up entirely of writers and the people who live with them, their children, lovers, husbands and wives.

That depends a little on how much you grant Roth's view of the writer -- his view of detachment. Everyone who goes to a funeral attends not only as a mourner but as something else, too, a doctor, a teacher, etc: also, as someone who must maintain continuing relations with the living. It is not immediately clear that the professional detachment of writers offers a different kind of escape from these relationships'; that it makes such different demands on them. Everyone feels the conflict between the roles they inhabit, but Roth wants to argue that the writer feels it differently, and that that difference has something to say about how people should live. The reader should be interested in the view of the writer, not because they are alike, but because they are unalike; and the reader has something to learn from the detachment the act of reading allows him to share in. The writer, on this understanding, is someone who has opted out, of sex as much as anything else; his books make the case for it. Kindliness and curiosity are at odds with each other. "Niceness", Zuckerman writes dismissively in The Counterlife, "is even more deadly in writers than it is in other people." Of course, there is another case to be made: that the loving view and the true view are really the same thing; that the stranger's eye, for all its compensating curiosity, sees less deeply and sharply than love.

What novelists rely on as much as anything else is their instinct for what they should write about. Perhaps the greatest validation for the line Roth decided early in his career to take is the late flowering it has granted him. Part of the credit must go to the absence of sentiment in his work: he breaks out of comfortable habits of thought as restlessly as his characters break out of their marriages. The Zuckerman sequence includes one of Roth's best novels, I Married a Communist (1998); and the others in the series, though less consistently good, are all of them driven by a sharp sense, both political and personal, of what matters and what doesn't. (Reading Roth makes one realize how rare that is in fiction; how often novelists are seduced by the trivial.) The gently postmodern games he plays with his narrative alter egos belong for the most part rather to the tradition of Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld and Woody Allen than Paul Auster: they simply allow Roth to continue to talk about his life in fictional terms, without putting on too elaborate a fictional costume.

Roth's new book, Everyman, is more novella than novel; and though it deals with old age -- the un-Happy Hour, as it were, for all Roth's favourite themes -- he plays no autobiographical games in it. The story opens with the funeral of its unnamed protagonist, a successful advertising executive who had retired to condo life on the Jersey shore to take up his long-cherished ambition of painting and teaching art. Roth uses the occasion to introduce his cast of characters -- the wives, the children, the brother, the mistresses and nurses -- and then tells the story of the man's life from the medical point of view. It is a kind of portrait of the hero as a hospital patient: from the hernia operation he has as a boy to the routine heart surgery that ultimately kills him. Eventually, Roth writes, people's "personal biographies . . . become identical with their medical biographies". Everyman, as this description suggests, does not mark a return to the lyric loveliness of Goodbye, Columbus; even so, the prose has a chilling utility that sometimes seems just about as unexquisite as a reader can be expected to stomach. "First my mother died", someone tells the protagonist, making conversation in a hospital waiting room:

"Six months later my father died, eight months after that my only sister died, a year later my marriage broke down and my wife took everything I had. And that's when I began to imagine someone coming to me and saying, 'Now we're going to cut off your right arm as well. Do you think you can take that?'. And so they cut off my right arm. Then later they come around and they say, 'Now we're going to cut off your left arm'. Then, when that's done, they come back one day and they say, 'Do you want to quit now? Is that enough? Or should we go ahead and start in on your legs?'."

Prospero retiring from his island promises that every third thought shall be his grave -- the other two, one might suppose, to be divided equally between the prospects of his children and the medical details of his hospital visits. That at least is more or less the recipe Roth is following, and one cannot help admiring again the simplicity of his narrative line. The novella, however, does offer an occasional relief from bleakness. There are scenes set outside the walls of hospitals, though these serve partly to explain the consolation available to the protagonist. The great failure, for example, of his third marriage lies in the fact that his wife -- a much younger woman, a Danish model named Merete who had been hired for one of his advertising campaigns -- isn't up to the role of comforter. "The woman is basically an absence and not a presence", his doctor warns him, requiring him to get professional help. Everyman makes you feel how much the power of such comforting counts for in life. The ability to comfort each other (not to arouse, or interest, or amuse) is what we finally depend on.

The great regret of his life is the break-up of his second marriage, to Phoebe, the mother of his favourite child. Their relations had become increasingly sexless; still, she had offered him, in her own words, the companionship of "a mature, intelligent woman" who "understands what reciprocity is". That he resigned it for the sake of "the little hole" at the back of a twenty-something Danish model strikes him as particularly foolish and sets up the problem Roth has been writing about since Goodbye, Columbus: how can we choose rightly to live when the sexual urge overwhelms us? How can we choose to live at all without that urge? Roth has no answer to these questions, as usual; but he seems, here as elsewhere, to incline towards something like chastity, when a man has the discipline for it, as the happier alternative.

Everyman is Roth's attempt to modernize The Death of Ivan Ilych. Although it lacks the terrible grandeur of Tolstoy's story, Roth's version might be set at a still lower temperature. Tolstoy, with a touch of sentimental warmth, suggests that Ivan is dying because he has not asked the right question about his life. "Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done?", it suddenly occurs to Ivan. "But how could that be when I did everything properly?"

This is one of Roth's favourite muddles, but the resolution to it solves less than one might suppose. His Everyman "was too much the good boy, and, answering to his parents' wishes rather than his own, he married, had children, and went into advertising to make a secure living". He escapes that life through a series of affairs and marriages, "convinced of his right, as an average human being, to be pardoned ultimately for whatever deprivations he may have inflicted upon his innocent children in order not to live deranged half the time". Sticking by Phoebe might have made the end of his life a little easier; he is wise enough to recognize that fact. Even so, Roth forces him to acknowledge that "what he'd learned was nothing when measured against the inevitable onslaught that is the end of life". In the past, Roth's narrators have admitted their personal stake in the stories while remaining themselves curiously objective and aloof. This time his own detached omniscient presence cannot resist getting a word in now and then, of wisdom or sympathy or both. "Old age", goes one such interjection, "isn't a battle; old age is a massacre" -- a touching break in form from a writer who has elsewhere taken such pleasure in watching the battles being fought. The title of the book is drawn not only from the tradition of morality plays, but from the name of the jewellery store, Everyman's, owned and run by the protagonist's father. "It's a big deal for working people to buy a diamond", he tells his sons, "no matter how small. The wife can wear it for the beauty and she can wear it for the status. And when she does, this guy is not just a plumber -- he's a man with a wife with a diamond. His wife owns something that is imperishable. Because beyond the beauty and the status and the value, the diamond is imperishable."

The point, of course, is that people are not; and this is where Roth's secular faith in the virtue of questioning falls short. His Everyman has his first inkling of death at his father's funeral. As the mourners, according to Jewish tradition, begin to pack the grave with earth, "all at once he saw his father's mouth as if there were no coffin, as if the dirt they were throwing into the grave was being deposited straight down on him, filling up his mouth". Perhaps the only weakness in Everyman is that there isn't really, in the end, any argument to keep up -- which is another way of saying that Philip Roth has reached the limit of what he can be funny about.

Benjamin Markovits's novel, Either Side of Winter, was published last year.

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