Word: everymanic
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Philip Roth, however, is one of the literary masters most attentive to the body. He has written lovingly about its lusts (Portnoy's Complaint), its decrepitude (The Dying Animal) and the intersection of the two (a ribald graveside scene in Sabbath's Theater). In his slim, stark novel Everyman (Houghton Mifflin; 182 pages), about the life and (mostly) death of an unnamed adman, Roth plays the body's trump card: someday it will die and take the mind with...
Roth, 73, has said he was inspired to write Everyman by growing old, seeing friends die (including author Saul Bellow) and realizing that few novelists have written about the simple process of death. Everyman is essentially a medical biography. It begins at its end: the protagonist's burial in a rundown Jewish cemetery in New Jersey near his parents. It then returns to the beginning, cataloging his brushes with mortality--a drowned sailor washes up near his boyhood home during WWII, a burst appendix nearly kills him in his 30s--then jumps to his old age, a parade of annual...
...novel's title comes from a Christian morality play about a visit from Death.) But Roth's protagonist rejects the "hocus-pocus" of God and Heaven. If he were to write his autobiography, he thinks, "he'd call it The Life and Death of a Male Body." For this Everyman, there is only life and the "deadening depersonalization" of illness, which negates the self...
...make a Jersey boy who shares Roth's cultural background and birth year (1933) into an archetype, effacing his individuality, inhibits the reader from feeling the protagonist's loss emotionally, rather than just intellectually. (And denying him a name creates pronoun confusion whenever "he" talks to another man.) That Everyman's hero dies is universal. How he dies is not: he is alone, isolated from his brother, sons and ex-wives because of his traits and choices--often selfish, childish ones--but Roth has sketched his story in broad terms that read like mere outlines of his earlier novels...
...together and our lives are filled with pain," he insists when the going gets roughest. That's only half right: at some moment between the occupation and the semiconductor, the Japanese ideal of togetherness faded. Now, as Kojima's sad, perceptive masterpiece instructs, it's every Everyman for himself...