The word "everyman" appears but twice inside the cover of this book: on the title page, and as the name of a jewelry store, the one that belonged to the subject's father ... a place 15 feet wide, 40 feet deep, on the streets of Elizabeth, N. J., where the old man "gave credit to everyone" and liked to hire "good Catholic girls" because he thought the non-Jewish customers wanted to be waited on by them.
The father and mother were the stalwarts of WWII America: stolid, responsible. Father runs the jewelry store, mother runs the house, the kids do errands, transporting jewelry back and forth for the store. Says Howie of his brother,
He loved being only nine years old and carrying the diamonds in an envelope in his jacket pocket onto the bus to Newark, where the setter and the sizer and the polisher and the watch repairman our father used each sat in a cubbyhole of his own, tucked away on Frelinghuysen Avenue. Those trips gave that kid enormous pleasure. I think watching these artisans doing their lonely work in those tight little places gave him the idea for using his hands to make art. I think looking at the facets of the diamonds through my father's jewelry loupe is something else that fostered his desire to make art.
§ § §Philip Roth being Philip Roth, it seems that some critics were expecting maybe a wrinkled version of Portnoy's Complaint. But this one is not about a frustrated, jerk-off kid and his psychiatrist. It is about you and me and every man and every woman getting old, losing our beauty, regretting some of the choices we've made, living with a body that is going awry, being envious of those who are still healthy.
Too, there is astonishment that --- when we see a young runner going down the boardwalk in her tanktop, and --- we find ourselves getting aroused, trying (comically, in some batty way) to seduce her, the twenties-something lovely: sweating, nice eyes, perfect body.
And you seventy.
April and December.
§ § §
The man of this book has two sons --- strong, healthy, successful, who loathe him, even though he wonders how they could ever expect him not to change. With surprise, he thinks on Anne, his daughter, who somehow manages to continue to care for him, after all the turmoil he (and she) went through when he left her mother for that Danish model.
There is all-enveloping loneliness, now, knowing that the games played so well to evade isolation when thirty or forty or fifty no longer work, that he (and we) have, in the process, made ourselves a desert ... where friends up and die on us, without our permission, making us even more uneasy. One of his old work buddies is dying of cancer; another is getting senile; a woman he picks up in his art class kills herself because of the pain. "Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre," Roth opines.
§ § §
In the interview he gave to journalist Martin Krasnik in Denmark last year, Roth said that he would like to shoot all reviewers. He also said, about this book, just then being delivered to the publisher:
The classic is called Everyman. It's from 1485, by an anonymous author. It was right in between the death of Chaucer and the birth of Shakespeare. The moral was always "Work hard and get into heaven," "Be a good Christian or go to hell." Everyman is the main character and he gets a visit from Death. He thinks it's some sort of messenger, but Death says, "I am Death" and Everyman's answer is the first great line in English drama: Oh, Death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind. When I thought of you least.
My new book is about death and about dying.
The critics have all assumed that the central character here is either Roth or Everyman. I doubt it. The real Everyman is probably his father, the unassuming jeweler on Frelinghuysen Avenue in Newark, who named his store Everyman's Jewelry. He was a straight-forward man, much closer to our medieval hero, one who assumes that all our burdens and all our woes go with the territory, who (apparently) thinks more about family and job than Whan the body lyeth in claye. For him, the appearance of death comes when least expected. Not so for our seventy-year-old unheroic hero who mulls on it and body losses, endlessly, to the point of wretched excess.
One critic lamented that this volume was like a dirge. Another said it was too preoccupied with sickness and death. Obviously these are punks in their early forties and fifties. For Everyman is an elegant dessert presented to us, at the table, perhaps a last supper, by the master chef, one who knows how to plant drama and delight and a special sullen truth.
We find our storied character, at the very last, just before the fatal operation, in the graveyard, talking to the bones of his mother and father, thinking on his youth, the power, when he was but fourteen, coming in on the Jersey shore,
the longing for the best of boyhood, for the tubular sprout that was then his body and that rode the waves from way out where they began to build, rode them with his arms pointed like an arrowhead and the skinny rest of him following behind like the arrow's shaft, rode them all the way in to where his rib cage scraped against the tiny sharp pebbles and jagged clamshells ... and he hustled to his feet .... and went lurching through the low surf ... into the advancing, green Atlantic, rolling unstoppably toward him like the obstinate fact of the future.
§ § §George Guidall, the reader on this Recorded Books version, is perfect for the job: old, whiskery voice, voice filled with the song of the Atlantic coast, perhaps New Jersey, perhaps not too far from Newark, certainly not far at all from Roth.
