|
   |
||||
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
 |
|||||||||||||||
|
|
Books :: Death's Head Boogie Philip Roth's latest novel is a well-written but disquieting meditation on the meaninglessness of mortality. "Everyman" by Philip Roth. (Houghton Mifflin)
Philip Roth has always been one step ahead of the zeitgeist. He was fed up with religious, familial and sexual Puritanism in the stories and novels of the late 1950s and early '60s, right before such rebellion became fashionable. More recently, "The Human Stain" railed against today's politically-correct Puritans of the left as well as of the right. "The Plot Against America," though not a parable of the second Bush Administration, couldn't help but put the reader in mind of our leader's inclinations toward scrapping civil liberties and cozying up to the religious right, at a time when the president's approval ratings were sky-high. And now, in "Everyman," Roth is playing pied piper to a country filled with aging Portnoys complaining about their dying parents and contemplating their own mortality. The tune he is playing, though, is hardly a merry one. The 182-page novel begins in the graveyard and the mood doesn't much brighten, or the scenery improve much for that matter, as it flashes back to the life of the unnamed protagonist. We all die, just as we did in the fifteenth century, when the original "Everyman" -- an allegorical play -- was written. Well, not just as we did. Our mid-millennium counterparts had heaven and hell to deal with. We have being and nothingness. As the accent is on the latter in "Everyman," some critics have complained that nothing has come of nothing, that "Everyman" is an empty shell compared to more fully developed works of Roth's about aging such as "Sabbath's Theater" or the nonfiction "Patrimony," his memoir on his father's death and dying. It is hard to feel terribly warm about a book featuring a character obsessed with death at an early age and who then undergoes a series of surgeries in later life. He finally graduates to "unbearable loneliness" while thinking about "the hollowness of the pursuit to which he had dedicated his retirement," "the deadening depersonalization of serious illness," "hopelessness," "the process of becoming less and less" and "the rage and despair of a joyless sick man." In short, "It was time to worry about oblivion." It's like Samuel Beckett with all the humor and absurdism deleted. Not even those bits of relief are allowed the Roth reader. So why would anyone but the most confirmed masochist bother with such a despair-filled and disquieting novel? Perhaps because like pressing down on a decayed tooth, "Everyman" feels like you're confronting pain instead of just letting it drag you down. Much of Roth reads that way -- you know nothing good is going to happen in "Sabbath's Theater" or "When She Was Good," but the uncompromising prose won't let you go. This protagonist isn't as developed a character as the main figures in those books. He's a typical Roth guy who can't combine love and lust with the same woman for very long and whose digressions spell disaster for every meaningful relationship. Even his sons have no use for him after he leaves their mother, the first of three wives. Development isn't the point, though, in "Everyman." Roth seems more interested in the opposite -- stripping his character down to his basic needs and finding that security has become stasis (his words), libido has become atrophy, and life is inevitably turning to death. The rewards for the reader lie both in the style and content, or rather in the way that Roth melds style and content. There is always something liberating about watching artists spit in the face of illusion, even if the exercise is a joyless one. But that's merely expectorating if not accompanied by the artist's ability to shape such discontent. Roth, through his character, ultimately is much less concerned with the pointlessness of existence than he is with the primacy of life and the meaninglessness of death. "Once one has tasted life," he writes, "death does not seem normal." These snippets don't do justice, though, to Roth's prose, which can go on for page after page of sublime spleen-venting disguised as matter-of-fact cataloguing of pleasures and pains. But what cataloguing! Take this passage, which neatly elucidates the title of the book: "He never thought of himself as anything more than an average human being, and one who would have given anything for his marriage to have lasted a lifetime. He had married with just that expectation. But instead marriage became his prison cell, and so, after much tortuous thinking that preoccupied him while he worked and when he should have been sleeping, he began fitfully, agonizingly, to tunnel his way out. Isn't that what an average human being would do?" "Everyman" is the literary equivalent of a late Shostakovich string quartet. It describes a terrain that is undoubtedly bleak but the writing is so intense and lyrical that it creates its own kind of beauty. In a conversation with his parents at their gravesides, the character complains: "'I'm seventy-one. Your boy is seventy-one.' 'Good. You lived,' his mother replied, and his father said, 'Look back and atone for what you can atone for, and make the best of what you have left.'" It isn't manna from heaven, and certainly not redemption of any kind. Roth tells us that his parents' words of wisdom have to be enough. It's his great accomplishment in "Everyman" that they're more than enough. Read more about this book on amazon.com.
MORE ARTS HEADLINES
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
