Recent readings

I read relatively little fiction and, except for detective stories, even less contemporary fiction. But I was greatly rewarded by reading Philip Roth’s Everyman*. It is the story of the life of a man who feels that he is dying as he goes through the last twenty or so years of his life. He is Jewish, has gone through three marriages and divorces, and worked as an art director at a New York advertising agency. Funny thing: he is not given a name anywhere in the book–he is only described in third-person terms ("he", "his", "him"). He is Everyman.

* Everyman, by Philip Roth. Houghton Mifflin, New York 2006 (182 pages)

The story begins as his casket is lowered into a grave in a rundown Jewish cemetery in New Jersey, a cemetery founded by his grandfather in 1888. It contains the graves of his parents and those of many unrelated families. The mourners at the burial aren’t numerous–his second wife Phoebe and their daughter Nancy, in her mid-30's; his two sons by his first marriage, both in their late forties and clearly present only out of duty; his older brother Howie and his wife; a few former ad agency colleagues; and a few others who had known him at the Jersey shore retirement complex where he had been living. His death, at age 71, came when he was on the operating table undergoing a fifth operation for vascular problems.

The beauty of this novel is the way that Roth takes the reader through this man’s living, his thoughts, his fears without causing the reader to really like or dislike him. That sounds bland, but to me it was all the better.

He was reasonable and kindly, an amicable, moderate, industrious man, as everyone who knew him well would probably agree, except, of course, for the wife and two boys whose household he’d left and who, understandably, could not equate reasonableness and kindliness with his finally giving up on a failed marriage and looking elsewhere for the intimacy with a woman that he craved.

He had a soft manner with many people, such as the other elderly residents of his complex to whom he gave free art lessons. And especially with his daughter Nancy, a divorcee with twin daughters, who truly loved him notwithstanding his having left her and her mother for his third wife, a vacuous young thing about twenty years younger than he.

The story flows at an even pace, made all the more enjoyable by Roth’s fine word crafting. As Everyman contemplates the rest of his life--just a few years before it ended--he realizes:

Well, he was thrice divorced, a one-time serial husband distinguished no less by his devotion than by his misdeeds and mistakes, and he would have to continue to manage alone. From here on out he would have to manage everything alone.

There are two wonderful scenes near the end of the man’s life. One is when he reads an obituary of his former boss at the ad agency and phones the widow; his humanity comes through warmly in the conversation. At the same time he learns of two other colleagues who are hospitalized, one with depression and the other with prostate cancer. He phones them and has a very touching conversation with each.

For hours after the three consecutive calls–and after the predictable banality and futility of the pep talk, after the attempt to revive the old esprit by reviving memories of his colleagues’ lives, by trying to find things to say to buck up the hopeless and bring them back from the brink...he’d learned...the inevitable onslaught that is the end of life...Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.

The other scene is when he visits the cemetery, which he will soon inhabit, to be near his parents’ graves, he runs into a black man who is digging a grave. Their conversation is very mundane. Everyman asks the digger about the mechanics of digging a grave, hauling away most of the dirt but keeping just enough to cover the casket after it is lowered. (He finds that the digger had dug both of his parents’ graves.) The contrast, yet the closeness, of Everyman and the grave digger–two very different men--is displayed with grace.

"And you've been doing this work how long?" Everyman asks.

"Thirty-four years. A long time. It’s good work. It’s peaceful. Gives you time to think." is the digger’s response.

This was my first reading of Philip Roth’s work. I intend to read more.

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The Poe Shadow * I didn’t find very interesting; in fact, I didn’t finish it. It is a work of fiction, a period piece, in which a young lawyer in Baltimore, one Quentin Clark, attends Edgar Allan Poe’s funeral in that city (Poe died there in mysterious circumstances on October 7, 1849, at age 40). Afterward, Clark travels to Paris to look up C. Auguste Dupin, the father of all fictional private detectives, introduced to the world by Poe. Clark’s purpose for this visit is an attempt to put together the true story of Poe’s demise.

* The Poe Shadow, by Matthew Pearl. Random House, 2006 (370 pages).

The book should have interested me because I have read much Poe, I like mystery stories, and much of it takes place in Baltimore (although around 1849), in a suburb of which I have lived for many years. But somehow it didn’t. For me, it was an overly-contrived potboiler.