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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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Everyman
by Philip Roth |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Loss Philip Roth’s latest novel, Everyman,
is a book to read on a sunny day. Otherwise, many readers may experience a
gloom that can become hard to shake away. The story starts with the funeral
of the unnamed protagonist and proceeds to examine the life of this ordinary,
typical modern American man. He did what was expected of him, nothing
extraordinary. He was average, a mix of qualities and behaviors considered
good and others considered bad. Thanks to Roth’s talent, readers can plumb
the depths of this average man, and see the universality of life, especially
the losses we experience. Here’s an excerpt, pp. 29-32: The malaise began just days
after his return home from a monthlong vacation as happy as any he’d known
since the family vacations at the Jersey Shore before the war. He’d spent
August in a semi-furnished ramshackle house on an inland road on The only unsettling moments
were at night, when they walked along the beach together. The dark sea
rolling in with its momentous thud and the sky lavish with stars made Phoebe
rapturous but frightened him. The profusion of stars told him unambiguously
that he was doomed to die, and the thunder of the sea only yards away—and the
nightmare of the blackest blackness beneath the frenzy of the water—made him
want to run from the menace of oblivion to their cozy, lighted, underfurnished
house. This was not the way he had experienced the vastness of the sea and
the big night sky while he’d served manfully in the navy just after the
Korean War—never were they the tolling bells. He could not understand where
the fear was coming from and had to use all his strength to conceal it from
Phoebe. Why must he mistrust his life just when he was more its master than
he’d been in years? Why should he imagine himself on the edge of extinction
when calm, straightforward thinking told him that there was so much more
solid life to come? Yet it happened every night during their seaside walk
beneath the stars. He was not flamboyant or deformed or extreme in any way,
so why then, at his age, should he be haunted by thoughts of dying? He was
reasonable and kindly, an amicable, moderate, industrious man, as everyone
who knew him well would probably agree, except, of course, for the wife and
two boys whose household he’d left and who, understandably, could not equate
reasonableness and kindliness with his finally giving up on a failed
marriage and looking elsewhere for the intimacy with a woman that he craved. Most people, he believed,
would have thought of him as square. As a young man, he’d thought of himself as square, so conventional and
unadventurous that after art school, instead of striking out on his own to
paint and to live on whatever money he could pick up at odd jobs—which was
his secret ambition—he was too much the good boy, and, answering to his
parents’ wishes rather than his own, he married, had children, and went into
advertising to make a secure living. 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? Isn’t that what average
human beings do every day? Contrary to what his wife told everyone, he hadn’t
hungered after the wanton freedom to do anything and everything. Far from
it. He hungered for something stable all the while he detested what he had.
He was not a man who wished to live two lives. He held no grudge against
either the limitations or the comforts of conformity. He’d wanted merely to
empty his mind of all the ugly thoughts spawned by the disgrace of prolonged
marital warfare. He was not claiming to be exceptional. Only vulnerable and
assailable and confused. And convinced of his right, as an average human
being, to be pardoned ultimately for whatever deprivations he may have inflicted
upon his innocent children in order not to live deranged half the time. Terrifying encounters with
the end? I’m thirty-four! Worry about oblivion, he told himself, when you’re
seventy-five! The remote future will be time enough to anguish over the ultimate
catastrophe! Few readers
will envy the life of the protagonist of Everyman,
but all readers will find something familiar into this mirror into modern
American life. Steve Hopkins,
June 26, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the July 2006
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Everyman.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park,
IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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