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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
A moderate, amicable, reasonable man, fulfilling his duties to his family and society: Tolstoy famously condemned the type in "The Death of Ivan Ilych"--"Ivan Ilych's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible"--a judgment that Nathan Zuckerman believed to be uncharitable and suspected to be wrong. "Happy people exist too. Why shouldn't they?" asks Philip Roth's longtime alter ego, challenging Tolstoy in the early pages of "American Pastoral." Roth's 1997 novel depicts a moderate, amicable, and reasonable man assaulted by the forces of history: the all-American hero Swede Levov, whose shining moral confidence betrays not a chink through which the dark or terrible might penetrate. Maybe Tolstoy was right in regard to nineteenth-century Russia, Zuckerman admits; but in contemporary New Jersey, as far as anyone can tell from looking at Levov, ordinary lives turn out to be "just great, right in the American vein." Zuckerman soon discovers how wrong his own judgment has been. Swede Levov is destroyed precisely because of his trust in the safeguards of a respectable life. How could such a man ever be prepared for the change of luck, for the loss of control, for the physical and mental suffering that has no explanation? But then who is? "The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy," Zuckerman concludes: "that is every man's tragedy."
Of all the subjects that Philip Roth has tackled in his career--the Jewish family, sex, American ideals, the betrayal of American ideals, political zealotry, personal identity, the list could go on and on--none have proved as inexhaustible as the human body (usually male) in its strength, its frailty, and its often ridiculous need. Over the years, the subject has undergone as many complications and elaborations as the author's body of work. Performing what would seem the most interpretatively limited of acts, thirteen-year-old Alexander Portnoy, masturbating behind the bathroom door (scandalizing readers in 1969), and aging Mickey Sabbath, masturbating over his mistress's tomb (upping the ante in 1995), are emotional worlds apart: the boy holds on to the flesh, literally, in rebellion against the life that is being forced upon him; the old man desperately holds on to the life that is being taken away. A fiercely comic shtick has become, with the passage of time, a fiercely comic shtick that is also a howl to the heavens and a profound show of grief. Of all the adversaries that this often gleefully contentious novelist has taken on (Orthodox rabbis, orthodox feminists, another list impressively long), even the most insubordinate flesh cannot evade the one that Roth--at seventy-three--has been tracking now for some time: "the adversary that is illness," as he writes in his new book, "Everyman," "and the calamity that waits in the wings." It will come as no surprise to readers of "The Anatomy Lesson" or "Sabbath's Theater" that the fortress of the body has finally been taken by the enemy.
"The Summoning of Everyman" is the full title of the fifteenth-century English morality play from which Roth has drawn his title and some of his allegorical aims. The imperious summoning is done by Death ("A great enemy," Everyman moans, "that hath me in wait"), whom the medieval dramatist provides with a choice speaking role. Although this talkative personage arrives without warning, leaving Everyman--who has passed his life in pursuit of worldly pleasures--frantically unprepared to face the final reckoning, Roth's hero is beset by the kind of modern medical warnings that keep death ever present in one's mind. The question is whether these portents have left him any better prepared. Roth begins with Everyman's end: this brief novel opens at his funeral, and goes back in time to revisit a hernia operation when he is nine, a burst appendix at thirty-four, cardiac surgery at fifty-six, and an increasingly frequent series of hospitalizations for angioplasties, the installation of heart stents, and a defibrillator. Decades of health are passed over as beside the point; there is nothing like illness to hone the consciousness. And yet, as might be expected of this least abstract of...
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