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Roth’s Everyman ‘never thought of himself as anything more than an average human being’ and as he faces his own death he remembers his childhood and upbringing in Newark (a place Roth has effectively brought into being, much as one might say that Wordsworth invented the Lake District or Dickens made London). He chronicles his career, and writes about his life in a retirement village and his recent hospitalisations. When he imagines writing an autobiography, he says he’d call it The Life and Death of a Male Body.
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.
Roth has always written about people cracking apart, the unravelling of relationships and the crumbling of careers and ambitions. This time it’s literal disintegration that interests him, though ‘interests’ is the wrong word for a writer so obsessive and compulsive. In parts the book reads like a catalogue of surgical procedures, ‘the insertion of a stent that was transported on a catheter maneuvered up through a puncture in the femoral artery and through the aorta to the occlusion’.
But Everyman is not ER; it fascinates not merely, or not primarily, because of its clinical accuracy, but because of its sensuous intelligence and extraordinary rhythmic sentences, which seem simply to emanate from consciousness, but which we know — all of us who have ever attempted to get anything down on paper — emerge only slowly through revision and rewriting and critical self-examination and excruciating care. On almost every page there are those little cadenzas that characterise Roth’s work, those moments where he seems to hit on a note and take off with it:
In those eleven months before he died he seemed pierced by bewilderment, dazed by his diminishment, dazed by his helplessness, dazed to think that the dying man enfeebled in a wheelchair … could answer to his name.
He riffs memorably on one character: the
vitriolic despondency of one once assertively in the middle of everything who was now in the middle of nothing. Was himself now nothing, nothing but a motionless cipher angrily awaiting the blessing of an eradication that was absolute.
Everyman is a profound account of the agony which accompanies the ecstasies in ‘Song of Myself’:
And I know that all the men ever born are also my brothers … and the women my sisters and lovers.
Roth no longer makes a claim to be the greatest living American writer: Everyman says simply, ‘I am.’
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