Special to the Star Tribune
It has been suggested that Philip Roth, in the sunset of his career, must be juicing himself on the literary equivalent of steroids. What but a performance-enhancing elixir could explain Roth's inspired twilight work?
"Everyman" continues his recent streak of notable books. And although Roth is far from always perfect, the book is further proof he will be remembered and re-read. He'll also be the probable recipient of whatever awards he still hasn't won after his late-career surge that garnered a Pulitzer Prize, two National Book Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, a Library of America eight-volume collection of his complete works, and the highest honors granted by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
"Everyman" is everything that Roth's last novel, "The Plot Against America" (2004), wasn't. And that doesn't disparage either book. "The Plot Against America" is a 400-page global panorama of what happens to the United States in general and the Roth family of Newark, N.J., in particular when Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh is elected president in 1940 and immediately signs a peace pact with Hitler. Roth stumbled at the end of the tome, when the prose simultaneously lost both its tightness and elasticity, but it nevertheless was a deserved commercial and artistic success.
By contrast, his 192-page "Everyman" is as tight as a timpani, virtually every word in place, as Roth narrows his sights. Now he lives in the mind of the nameless "everyman," just a retired guy in his mid-70s, who has thrown away his health, three marriages, all but one of his children, his once-cherished older brother, and his beloved New York. Post 9/11, he has fled in fear to Starfish Beach, a retirement community on the New Jersey shore, where he teaches painting to physically withering residents.
There - just as the everyman in the medieval morality play of the same name - Roth's everyman confronts his bountiful regrets. For decades, he'd preached stoicism to his then-loved ones by saying, "There's no remaking reality. Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes."
But his hypocrisies are exposed in the go-go 1960s, when he was the high-flying art director at a big-time Manhattan ad agency, his expense account (and hair) unlimited, and the calendar pre-Anita Hill so he could be caught shtupping his secretary in the office and risk a mere finger-wagging.
Yet, as Faulkner wrote, "the past isn't dead; it isn't even past." So, as the everyman's life peters out as fast as a board-game sand timer, all that is left for him to ponder, in excruciating detail, is every hideous event, busted love affair and medical affliction that has left him there alone at Starfish Beach. With infinite recall of every occurrence that at one time enlivened him, he can now only bring forth despair.
"[L]ike any number of the elderly, he was in the process of becoming less and less," the narrator relates, "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 living for nothing. This is how it works out, he thought, this is what you could not know."
Not knowing what the hell he was getting into is the theme of the everyman's life. It can also be said that "not knowing" is the key to whatever is left of his life. Like Dostoevski's anti-hero in "Notes from Underground," Roth's creation knows only that the past doesn't matter except as a possible explanation for your present; and that unless you've gambled well with your life, no one will care about your future.
With "Goodbye Columbus" and "Portnoy's Complaint," Roth won the reputation as a "Jewish writer." But he's no more a "Jewish writer" than Toni Morrison is an "African-American writer." Both chronicle the universe of the mind and the body, not just poke at an ethnicity. So before Roth slips into his anecdotage, give him a medal, King Olav, give the man his Nobel.
Neal Karlen is the author of "Shanda: The Making and Breaking of a Self-Loathing Jew." He lives in Minneapolis.
EVERYMAN
By: Philip Roth.
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 192 pages, $24.
Review: Roth narrows his sights and tightens his prose for this study of a man in his 70s who must take moral stock of his actions. An inspired work from a man who, also in his twilight years, only gets better.