Everyman makes no bones about its subject. It begins at the funeral of the book's eponymous, nameless protagonist. The book is the proper eulogy that this man doesn't get at his funeral—a "noveulogy," of sorts. A man who "never put stock in an afterlife," he pays the price with namelessness once pulverized. Pulverized in both senses of the word: literally, returned to the dust whence he came and also soundly defeated by old age, which he describes as "a massacre."

Those gathered—his second wife Phoebe, the lover who freed him from his prison-like wedlock; his daughter Nancy, the result of his second failed marriage; his brother Howie, the model of vigor sprung from the same genes but with all the health; his two sons Randy and Lonny, the living reminders of his first failed marriage; and then Maureen, the buxom nurse that saw him to full recovery after his first of many open-heart surgeries—offer up mediocre eulogies. Phoebe only musters a few words; Nancy talks about her grandparents and the cemetery. Howie, not betrayed like the rest of his living family, gives the lengthiest account of the ad-man, but it's really his father's jewelry shop that he recollects. He lists all the attractive young girls he hired to work the counters by name, Harriet, May, Annmarie, Jean, Myra, Mary, Patty, Kathleen, and Corine, as if replicating the incongruity of King Lear's idiot savant recollection of Tray, Blanch, and Sweet-heart. Maureen says nothing. But her parting gesture reveals more than the rest:

When, with a smile, she let the dirt slip slowly across her curled palm and out the side of her hand onto the coffin, the gesture looked like the prelude to a carnal act. Clearly this was a man to whom she'd once given much thought.

Roth's language mimics the hushed delicacy of the dust's gradual path from hand to coffin and punctuates the sentence with an equally incongruous, perhaps not quite inappropriate, sign of respect. And then there's Lonny, the younger son, who looks like he's ready to vomit.

The interred's long history of bad health, which Howie alludes to at the beginning of his eulogy, erupts with his appendix. "The malaise began just days after his return home from a monthlong vacation as happy as any he'd known." The raging appendix and its periotinitic cohort are operated after a month where he no one could diagnose his ailment. The ruptured appendix is the incarnation of the deeper, psychological malady. During that idyllic August littered with daily romps on the dunes of Martha's Vineyard , the profound fear that gnaws on the adulterer first rears its ugly head. Seven miles off Cape Cod 's coast, the summer haven's nights broadcast the black pitch of oblivion, unspoilt by light pollution. While his lover of two years, Phoebe, revels in the night's expanse, her paramour cowers beneath it:

The profusion of stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die, and the thunder of the sea... made him want to run from the menace of oblivion.

Once we ignore the fact that Roth renders this profound isolation in the midst of the summerers' high season, we can grasp the significance of this leap in thinking about death. In Roth's 1995 novel, Sabbath's Theater , Mickey Sabbath, the lecherous, aged creep whose chutzpah Roth dilutes in Everyman 's impotent protagonist, outlines the history of thought regarding death. He describes it as a transition from Et moriemur , we all will die, to la mort de soi, one's own death, and culminating in la mort de toi, the death of an other. Everyman's desperation stems from his contemplation of la mort de soi without recourse to its precursor and thus, shoots past the feeling of commonality inherent to every man's decay to a feeling of loneliness. Howie points to this crushing burden, as well: "he had health problems, and there was also loneliness—no less a problem."

We've seen this terrifying oblivion before with Roth and again we can turn to a Sabbath haunted by his simultaneous consciousness of the mutually exclusive "fantasy of endlessness" and "fact of finitude." But the antipodes that demarcate Everyman 's scope are firmly concretized in sex and illness. The two act as consequential counterweights. The advent of his physical deterioration seems to coincide with his infidelity, and he salves his deterioration by pursuing the young, curvaceous jogger on the Starfish Beach boardwalk outside his senior center.

In Sabbath, the endlessness-finitude interplay surfaces in a reference to Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." He conjures up his own vase depicting "dancing nymph and bearded figure brandishing phallus." In the ode, the lover's pursuit of his desire is frozen and couples curse with pleasure:

..............Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
.......Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
..............She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
...........Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

The reference simultaneously makes light of and seizes upon the excruciating repression of climax. Sabbath, the bearded figure, once his dancing nymph has passed beyond the grave, has no other way of sanctifying her than by either coming or peeing on her grave. He is doomed to the same mode of expression, incongruity be damned. Sabbath knows no other way to show his devotion aside from the tried and true sexual stunts of the past—which are already plenty strange in the hands of a senior citizen.

The despair Roth describes in Everyman he derives from Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." This failed-husband lover finds himself stuck careening down the post-climax descent. Roth prefaces the "noveulogy" with perhaps its four most despairing lines:

..........Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
.......Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
..........Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
.............Where but to think is to be full of sorrow.

"Here," and its frighteningly unidirectional stasis, has swallowed everyman since age thirty-four. Any action, be it speech or growth or thought, leads without compromise to that terrifying oblivion. This is the oblivion, the restless everyman realizes as feelings of claustrophobia and exile seep through the walls of his New Jersey senior citizen condo, that menaces him:

He had displaced himself just when what age most demanded was that he be rooted as he'd been for all those years he ran the creative department at the agency. Always he had been invigorated by stability, never by stasis. And this was stagnation.

Roth, no writer to turn down a self-imposed challenge, combines, the interred's two greatest fears, oblivion, articulated at the novel's outsest, and stasis, only realized just now, in his climactic but resolutely somber scene. Like a bookend for Roth's sober restrospective, he resurrects Keats' emphatic Here : "Here alone contentment was attainable." And where is here? A neglected cemetery, standing over his parents' graves. Here, at "the butt end of the airport" with "the steady din of the New Jersey Turnpike" in earshot, where Phoebe's debilitating stroke remains fresh in his mind, where the suicide of Millicent, his only source relief at Starfish presses, where the depression, cancer, and death of three of his colleagues heap on his thoughts, he is overcome with la mort de toi . This awakening allows for everyman's mental transformation and acclimation with death. He has come full circle, having relived the entire cycle of the human thought on death as described in Sabbath and having experience all the unnecessary pain that goes along with defying the pattern. He comfortably chats with the gravedigger, the first time for a long time that loneliness seems to recede.

Sabbath's loneliness, on the other hand, dogs him to the novel's very last, stuck in an urn painting reprisal of one. Honey-tongued Mickey, who could inveigle any woman into his erotic theatrics, who contrived with ease les petits morts of many, cannot effect his own death. He goads wildly Matthew, his lover's son, who catches him peeing on her grave, to kill him. But he is rebuffed. Finitude for Sabbath is not so much fact as fantasy. Everyman is more hesitant to articulate his underlying death wish. His creeps to the surface and is voiced subtly before his eighth annual heart surgery:

This time when he was asked by the anesthesiologist if he wanted the local or the general anesthetic, he requested the general so as to make the surgery easier to bear than it had been the first time around.

He excuses opting for the general as avoiding the harrowing hours of listening impotently as surgeons scrape and saw away. The emergency room veteran knows full well the risk he's inviting. Again, Howie's eulogy informs us at the very end:

He handed it to the nurse to lock away for safekeeping while he was having the surgery that killed him.

He, who "had grown accustomed to being on his own and fending for himself," whose "deliberate independence constituted his bedrock strength," and refused to tell Nancy about his surgery so that she wouldn't worry over him while she was worrying over Phoebe's convalescence, retains his independence (as debilitating as deliberate) until his very last. His handing over his most prized possession, his father's watch, marks his transformation, his reconciliation with finitude as a fact, his escape from Keats's stasis and embrace of oblivion.

It is a landscape vastly different from Sabbath that Roth paints in Everyman . He seems to have forsworn his trademark Rothian romps and resolute irreverence. But at bottom, the scope of this "noveulogy" is decidedly smaller than Sabbath 's, even requiring a contrapuntal comparison to illuminate its probings. When coupled with its predecessor of a decade, Everyman takes on a deeper, fuller meaning. But Sabbath remains required reading in order to appreciate what Roth has done. He has narrowed the parameters of his treatment of finitude, and in so doing arrives at a satisfactory death for everyman, something he could not in good faith arrange for Mickey Sabbath. Just as he denies everyman's singular request "to have it all over again," this is Roth indulging his own.

 

Hezekiah A. Smith spends his free time exultantly singing Disney numbers.