The Menace of Oblivion

Everyman begins “around the grave.”  And it stays there for the course of its brief length, stewing in angst and mortal fear. Clearly, it is the work of a man coming to grips with his own mortality – a terrified man at the edge of the abyss. 

The newest novel from famous atheist Philip Roth revolves around humanity’s lowest common denominator: death. There is numbingly little dynamic in Roth’s prose – the dirge-like tempo never even hints at vivace. A tidy summary of the story, which chronicles the life of an aging former ad exec, can be found in the text: “Eluding death seemed to have become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story.”

The slim novel, its cover cloaked in mournful black, is a progression of scenes that mostly take place in hospitals or cemeteries. The span of years between these morbidly vivid moments is little more than a daydream for the unnamed protagonist, the titular “Everyman.” Real life is the terror – Death is everywhere, a specter Everyman sees all around him, from the “vastness of the sea and the big night sky,” to his doctor’s masked face. Glimpses of beauty are rare and almost too much to bear, for they are only found in the piercing nostalgia of bygone days, in a boyhood filled with “the ecstasy of a whole day being battered silly by the sea.” These fleeting moments of beauty are doomed to pass into oblivion. Everyman looks forward to nothing; he waits and dreads. His attitude is defeatist: “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.”

I’m not sure where Roth got the idea that Everyman was an apt title for this story of an unapologetic anti-hero, a character that ultimately amounts to little more than a dirty, frightened old man. The novel is chock-full of medical jargon and descriptions of surgical procedures, but the protagonist remains nameless. If the protagonist is an “everyman,” then it’s a wonder the world isn’t a vastly bleaker place than it is (though Roth would contend that it is a bleak place – no thanks to curmudgeons like himself). Most average Joes I know manage to avoid having three wives, don’t have such an incessantly bad medical history, and aren’t intolerant, intolerable nihilists. If there is a sense of morality in Everyman, it’s terribly vague. Even with a contemporary nihilist like Bret Easton Ellis, there are some guiding moral principles drawn from reason and life experience. There is none of this in Everyman. Roth’s philosophy amounts to Everyman’s idea for the title of his autobiography: “The Life and Death of a Male Body.”

Everyman is proud and self-absorbed. He has the whiny, know-it-all attitude of a fourteen year old, and the way he deals with the “truths” he’s so certain of are equally adolescent. He detests his good-natured older brother because of his excellent health. He detests his sons from his first marriage, because they detest him. “You wicked bastards!” he rants. “You condemning little shits!” Why must he suffer, he begs to know, when he was so good a father as to pay his alimony and child support bills? He couldn’t help it, he defends himself, if lust got the better of him, leading to affair after affair.

It’s hard to feel much sympathy for this guy.

The novel is devoid of humor. Not surprising, perhaps, from the author who, when asked to smile for a photograph, said, “I don’t smile.” 

“Do you ever smile at all?” the photographer asked Roth.

“Yes,” Roth said. “When I’m hiding in a corner and no one sees it.”

I wonder if his title shouldn’t have been, “The Life and Death of an Angst-Ridden Teenager Stuck in a 71 Year Old Body.”

It’s tough not to read Everyman without feeling that it is something of an autobiography. Roth admits that his characters are “all me.” Both Roth and Everyman were born in 1933; both are New Jerseyans; both have suffered chronic medical maladies; both have a history with women that will make their many lovers and wives “scream at his casket” at their respective funerals – words the character uses and that Roth used in an interview, verbatim. Or so they might hope, anyway. Everyman seems to take perverse pleasure in knowing he will be hated, as though this passion gives meaning to his fading life.

The late Pope John Paul II, said, “The opposite of love is not hate, but use.” Everyman is the epitome of use: The only time he feels truly alive is when he is feeding his lust. Even the art classes he teaches at a retirement home are conducted with the object in mind of finding a woman. Instead, he finds that he is only attracted to the “robustly health young women” jogging along the coastline during his morning walk. His vitality depends on sex. Without it, life is entirely devoid of meaning. As a man of fifty, he hits on women less than half his age. And as he approaches seventy … well, he’s still at it. Women are objects, used for sex, and occasionally for companionship and comfort. But it is not their greater good he has in mind, it’s his. Women, in Everyman’s terms, should either service him sexually or maternally. They are a means to his end, in a Sartre-like illustration of the subject (how we see ourselves) defining others as objects to be used for the subject’s own purpose and happiness. I find it difficult to reconcile some of the liberal, feminist ideologies of the political left – the group most likely to sing Roth’s praises – with his deep-seated misogyny, a trait displayed throughout his novels.

The character, and evidently Roth too, lack the deeper reflection of many other non-believers. Roth and Everyman have it all figured out: the answer is “meaninglessness.” Everyman finds only ephemeral pleasure in the presence of other human beings, or in the wonders of nature. To him, Life is nothing more than a shallow, cruel existence for a species of sentient chunks of meat. The glass isn’t just half-empty – it’s empty, period. And Roth does a fine job hammering this dogma into our head over and over again during the course of the book.

Even an existential philosophy isn’t worth the effort for Everyman, despite the angst he incessantly feels about impending oblivion. He wiles away his days sitting alone in his apartment, moping and unable to call his family and thinning number of friends because of his pride. As his bitterness grows, so is there a relative logarithm of loneliness.

Both Roth and Everyman (increasingly synonymous, we find) detest any form of religion. Everyman’s words: “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.” Roth’s words in a 2006 interview: “I’m anti-religious. I find religious people hideous. I hate the religious lies. It’s all a big lie.” Roth fails to offer any reasoning to bolster these fervent statements, even in the ripe setting of a novel. He assumes that any halfway intelligent person will agree with him. And yet Everyman seems the childish one – afraid of the dark, terrified of death, and completely self-absorbed.  

Philip Roth is the winner of a multitude of national awards; he’s heralded time and time again as the greatest living American writer. (I can imagine him twitching uncomfortably when they say “living.”) I looked long and hard to find what was so exceptional about Roth’s writing. Aside from a nice turn of phrase here and there, the prose was drab and dull. The dialogue is spotty, ranging from the long-winded, to the realistic, to the silly (Everyman’s wife speechifies: “I can’t bear the role you’ve reduced me to. The pitiful middle-aged wife, embittered by rejection, consumed by rotten jealousy! Raging! Repugnant!”). On occasion, the third-person narrative voice weirdly interjects. Sentences such as, “Wearily and tearfully they walked from our species’ least favorite activity” are the sign of an author accustomed to first-person storytelling, and his efforts in Everyman come across as sloppy and heavy-handed. “Nineteen eighteen,” the narrator (or somebody) intones like a documentary voice-over, “only one of the terrible years among the plethora of corpse strewn amni horribles that will blacken the memory of the twentieth century forever.” That reads like a strained high school history report.

What little there is of a plot is a chronological mess, jumping back and forth in time, defusing suspense. Nothing drives the story. From the very beginning, we know Everyman dies – and there’s no mystery even to be found in death, according to Roth. So why, exactly, did I spend six hours of my life reading it? What did I learn?

Good question. I learned that I wish I hadn’t wasted my time.

For the most part, the book is skin-deep. That’s part of Roth’s point, I suppose. There are few nuances, no profound insights. I’ve found more meaning and insight into the human condition in Alistair MacLean novels – really. I worry about where the human grace of altruism might go if our society were to become populated solely by Roth’s Everymen. Let’s just say I wouldn’t count on anyone jumping in a river to save me if I was locked inside a sinking car.

In the end, what is Roth’s point? He certainly doesn’t suggest that life is beautiful and every day is worth living to its fullest, as if there was no tomorrow – not when his character sits in his apartment day and night, sulking about old age, unable to pursue his interests because they really don’t matter anyway. It’s a wonder that Everyman doesn’t just commit suicide – it would be more honest.

I will grant that Philip Roth is bold to so openly and directly tackle a subject that makes most of us squirm. For those who have given little thought to their own fate, the novel may prove thought-provoking. It is otherwise unmoving, artistically bankrupt.

 

“Nothing to be done,” Everyman thinks while undergoing surgery. “No fight to put up. You take it and endure it. Just give yourself over to it for as long as it lasts.” My sentiments exactly while reading Everyman.