The Book Tower

They were just bones, bones in a box, but their bones were his bones, and he stood as close to the bones as he could, as though the proximity might link him up with them and mitigate the isolation born of losing his future and reconnect him with all that had gone. For the next hour and a half, those bones were the things that mattered most.

According to Harold Bloom, the four major American novelists of the current era are Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo and Philip Roth. After recently reading and enjoying McCarthy for the first time I decided to move onto Roth’s latest. Interestingly, both authors were born in 1933 and, although The Road and Everyman are vastly different, I did find them exploring similar themes, or at least provoking me to consider certain, very big, subjects.

Philip Roth’s Everyman is about death, illness, regret and dying, but strangely it isn’t really a depressing read. The novel begins with an unnamed man’s funeral before backtracking over the events of his life. It’s intelligently written and moving, and Roth manages to delve into the complex life of an individual in such a comparitavely short book. The novel moves back and forth rapidly through time but there’s meaning in Roth’s meanderings. His subject’s memories tend to spark other memories, many of them being linked by periods spent in hospital, either as a small child with a hernia, or visiting others – dying parents and friends. Roth also conjours up a vivid image of a Jewish family and their New York jewellery shop in the 1940s, bringing the past alive, while at the same time delivering an elegy to a spent life.

Roth’s Everyman isn’t a particularly likeable character. I read him as arrogant, and I wamed to him less during the scene where, as an old man, he attempts and fails to pick up a young girl jogging in the park. There’s also sections of the book describing his particular sexual preferences that I’d much sooner have remained unaware of. He’s failed at marriage three times, two of his three children dislike him. He grows old, grows ill and faces death. Why should I feel sorry for him? As a reader it was entirely my choice; the dying man seeks redemption and he’s in the hands of the reader. His plight becomes compelling; I didn’t like him but I did care for him. And I forgave him.

There’s much to admire in Everyman because it is such a skilfully written novel. The closing pages were the most effective for me, where the man visits the family graveyard and strikes up a conversation, Hamlet – style, with the resident gravedigger. It’s poetic and elegant writing at its best, and where a lesser writer could fail dismally (sinking too far into Shakespearean pastiche) Roth handles it with real art.

Everyman is a concise and brilliantly written book by a writer who, although now in his mid seventies, is – and here comes the cliché – working at the height of his powers. It’s a meditation on life and its end that I would imagine -and hope – Ian McEwan will also be delivering twenty years from now. Until then, Everyman is one of the best ruminations on death that I’ve ever read, and features an admirable homage to Hamlet. And do I agree with Harold Bloom? Two of the best novels I’ve read this year are by McCarthy and Roth so, partly, yes, although this jury is still out on Pynchon…