Word: rothe
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...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...
...ancient idea: death renders us all the same. The protagonist sees those around him reduced to symptoms--an ex-wife felled by a stroke, a lady friend racked with back pain, an ex-colleague failing mentally. Roth is writing in the medieval tradition of memento mori--remember that you must die. (The 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...
...problem is that in fiction, let alone life, the singular self does matter. Trying to 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...
...Roth's credit that he cannot quite bring himself to write a book as dull and flat as Everyman's concept seems to demand. His style repeatedly breaks its leash, as at the funeral, when the protagonist's brother gives a moving eulogy and his estranged son struggles violently against unbidden grief. But then the narrator interjects that there had been 500 funerals in New Jersey that day and that except for the aforementioned moments, this one was "no more or less interesting than any of the others." It's an astonishing passage: an author arguing, against the evidence...
...Roth is too well attuned a writer to win this argument. His protagonist's memories of his boyhood are crystalline: "He ran home barefoot and wet and salty, remembering the mightiness of that immense sea boiling in his own two ears and licking his forearm to taste his skin fresh from the ocean and baked by the sun." And Roth conjures an understated, haunting set piece in which the man visits the cemetery and chats with the affable worker who will soon dig his grave. These are glimpses of the Everyman whose story would have been more powerful had Roth...