 Reviewed by Brian L. Youngwright
There are countless things human beings are scared about, and most of these fears are universal - even if they tend to affect individual life in varying degrees and intensities. One person worries obsessively about the constant failure of relationships, the other about impending bankruptcy; one person is petrified by his seeming inability to live up to his own expectations, the other paralyzed by the idea of terrorist attacks. And on goes the list, ad infinitum. Often enough, even the best psychiatrist can provide only a limited cure.
Literature also deals with human fears – as illustrated by the great American writer Philip Roth in his most recent novel Everyman: a small, at moments utterly unpleasant and, yes, somewhat scary read, in which Roth addresses the most deeply rooted and universal of human fears. A fear for which there is no cure at all. Roth’s Everyman is a book about the horrors evoked by the dark and vague specters patiently waiting for each of us: old age, bodily decay, pain, and ultimately death.
Sure enough, the novel begins with the inevitable: the funeral of its protagonist. Like the character at the center of the medieval morality play of the same name, we know him as simply “Everyman”. In his lifetime a fairly successful commercial advertiser, thrice married, father of three, a man of Jewish origin yet an unbeliever, Everyman is now lowered below ground in a completely ordinary procedure.
“Up and down the state that day there’d been five hundred funerals like his”.
Death, the fear of which Everyman has tried to repress for most parts of his life, has finally come. The lights are out. Finish.
From that end, Roth unfolds the beginning. A story of a more or less ordinary life: childhood, first love, marriages and affairs, successes and failures, all of which is overshadowed by an increasing collapse of Everyman’s health and bodily functions. In nauseating, almost sadistic medical detail, Roth describes the cutting and stitching on the operation table, providing almost as much insight into bypass surgery as an instruction guide for heart surgeons. What to think about such a book? It’s as much provocation as preparation, and a kind of memento mori that chills to the bone. Alas, not much of a laugh here, but, it does make you appreciate that you’re (still) alive and healthy and that all other fears are in comparison miniscule.
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