Jonathan Cape, £10
A few American artistic rebels live long enough to acquire an aura of respectability simply by virtue of their survival, but it's relatively rare. Conventional critical circles in the US don't, by and large, feel impelled to accept and co-opt their problem children. In France, such people might, as their careers wind down, be elected to the Académie française, and in Britain, if sufficient smoke has been allowed to clear, they might even find themselves on the receiving end of a knighthood; in the US, though, it is impossible to imagine the likes of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, John Cage or Ornette Coleman ever being awarded the rough US equivalent, a Kennedy Centre Honour. Artists like these remain outsiders throughout their careers, throughout their lives, grudgingly acknowledged perhaps, but never made welcome at the establishment's high table. They may become celebrities, in a minor sort of way, but they are unlikely to be celebrated outside their own narrow worlds.
Trained at the University of Chicago, a protégé of Saul Bellow, his early stories showcased in the New Yorker and other prestigious mainstream publications, he seemed in the late 1950s and early 1960s to be taking his place among the succession of Jewish-American novelists that included Bellow himself, along with Daniel Fuchs, Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw, Bernard Malamud, Joseph Heller and many others.
His first three books fit comfortably into that tradition. It was only with his fourth, Portnoy's Complaint, that he achieved the thoroughgoing disreputability for which he may have been aiming from the start: obscene, offensive, extravagant, virtuosic and very funny, it became a phenomenon as well as a bestseller, making Roth rich and famous, but also relocating him on America's cultural map. Once heir apparent to a canonical literary tradition, Roth now found himself an outlaw. "I'd like to meet him," the trash novelist Jacqueline Susann said of the creator of literature's most notorious compulsive masturbator, "but I wouldn't want to shake his hand." She could have been speaking for polite society generally.
Over the ensuing decades, however, he worked his way back into the critical fraternity's good graces, and now finds himself honoured as an American master—probably, along with John Updike, one of the country's two most respected living authors. He managed this rehabilitation on his own terms, without apology or recantation, simply by producing a consistent body of splendid work. A prolific writer deploying many forms and styles, he could write broad, raucous comedy; tender realist drama; postmodern metafiction; and, increasingly as the years have gone by, a series of melancholic meditations on life's transience and dissatisfactions, largely filtered through his alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman.
Although not a Zuckerman novel, Everyman, Roth's latest offering, represents perhaps the outermost limits permitted by this last style. A very short book with an unnamed protagonist and a strangely scattershot expository strategy, it is a terse, unsparing account of physical and emotional decline, of a life not so much wasted as gradually—and then not so gradually—wasting, dissipating, evanescing. It begins, pointedly enough, with the protagonist's funeral, and then flashes backward to his childhood stay in hospital for hernia surgery, and then follows him, with what seems almost arbitrary intermittence, through a staccato series of crises to his death some six decades later. I say "arbitrary" because so much traditional novelistic material is withheld, but there is unquestionably a consistent theme to the episodes we are shown. Of the 17 distinct (although unseparated) sections I was able to isolate, no fewer than 12 were directly and overtly concerned either with death or some harbinger of death, with funerals, strokes, surgeries, intractable pain, coronary infarcts and suicide. The derelict cemetery in which the protagonist and his parents are buried is the venue for several important scenes, and is evoked with the vividness and specificity of a recurring character.
Everyman is, in short, a brief ramble through mortality with reminders of the ultimate destination posted at every stop en route. And it is, contrary to what some reviewers have suggested, every bit as depressing as this description might suggest. Yet there is exhilaration to be found in some of its clear-eyed, unsparing prose, simple and restrained by Roth's often bravura standards, but no less powerful for that.
Does Roth offer us anything redemptive to lift the gloom, does he suggest any solace? I would have to say he does not, and the book's sheer bleakness is not, to my mind, any sort of recommendation. Proof of seriousness, if you like, and an earnest of its integrity, but hardly a guarantor of aesthetic enjoyment. Still, a provocative theme does emerge in this book that has largely been absent from—indeed contradicted by—most of Roth's earlier writing, and it may just signal the possibility of consolation in future work. From Portnoy on, he has made himself, with singular, almost ruthless determination, a defiant celebrant of raw appetite, a zestful enthusiast of the id, an unapologetic reveller in greedy pleasure. Those characters injured along the way—and he has never tried to deny their existence—the collateral damage of such an approach to life, have not always excited a great deal of compassion in Roth's fiction. And when his characters' real-life prototypes have been evident to knowledgeable readers, this absence of compassion might even be considered outright cruelty.
His new everyman, however, almost uniquely in his oeuvre, is forced to confront the human costs of selfishness, and of unconstrained sensual omnivorousness. Three marriages destroyed by adultery (one of the former wives sympathetically portrayed as a potential soulmate lost— squandered—for a lust convincingly portrayed as both exigent and ridiculous); two estranged, embittered sons; a beloved brother with whom he has had no contact for years; as the protagonist's abilities diminish and his world contracts, his isolation becomes almost absolute. And even more tellingly, in a passage of deep, unadorned self-loathing, Roth's everyman recognises and confronts his responsibility for the pain he has caused, and the isolation that has resulted. Alone, he must drive himself to the hospital where he will soon die on the operating table.
Everyman is a harrowing book, and one's admiration for it is rarely tainted by easy pleasure. But does it perhaps point the way for Roth's future work? He has demonstrated the will and courage to stare death in the face unblinkingly. Is it now time for him also to re-examine life?
