No American novelist knows his craft better than Philip Roth. But in the past decade, as he turned out a series of masterworks and became, at 71, a best-seller all over again, Roth apprenticed at a literary form that was new to him: the eulogy. "It's not a genre I wanted to master," says the Newark, New Jersey-born writer at the offices of his literary agent, dressed in a black sweater and blue oxford shirt. "I've attended funerals of let's say four close friends, one of whom was a writer." He wasn't prepared for any of them.
"The plan goes like this. Your grandparents die. And then in time your parents die. The truly startling thing is that your friends start to die. That's not in the plan." Roth says this experience prompted him to write Everyman (Houghton Mifflin Company, $24), his latest novel and a stunning meditation on the meaning of mortality. The action opens at the funeral of its unnamed hero, and then backtracks to give us the man's life story. In many ways, Everyman is not a typical Roth character. He works in advertising and remains a faithful father and husband for long stretches of time. "I wanted a man who was in the mainstream," says Roth. "So [this guy] attempts to lead a life within the conventions, and the conventions fail him, as they do conventionally."
Over time, as his body breaks down, Roth's character leaves his marriage, falls out with his brother and ultimately quits advertising to spend his retirement painting. All the while his internal body clock is ticking away. Or more appropriately: breaking down. He has six stents installed and numerous minor procedures done. In fact, the novel, which Roth once called The Medical History, could be read like a very well-fleshed-out physician's chart. "As people advance in age," says Roth, who turned 73 in March, "their biography narrows down to their medical biography. They spend time in the care of doctors and hospitals and pharmacies, and eventually, as happens here, they become almost identical with their medical biography."
In numbers alone, Roth has a winning conceit here. The population is getting older, especially in America, and questions of health—and mortality—will presumably be on their mind. Dr. Jerome Groopman, a medical columnist for The New Yorker and a professor at Harvard Medical School, says Roth "clearly did his homework when it came to many of the clinical aspects."
Several operating scenes are described in detail, as are the technicalities of recovery. But Groopman believes there's much more to the novel then that. "The meat of the book, the heart of it, is the story of this man and the human condition and the mistakes we make through life—how these then come back and are shown to fail to protect us from the fear and loneliness facing mortality."
In this fashion, the novel draws upon the 15th-century morality play, Everyman, in which a vigorous young man meets Death upon the road. "Everyman then utters what is perhaps as strong as any line written between the death of Chaucer and the birth of Shakespeare," says Roth, savoring the language. "Oh, death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind." Roth's hero has a series of these moments. In his childhood, he nearly dies of a burst appendix. In his youth, he has an epiphany while standing on the beach. "The profusion of stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die," goes one passage. "The thunder of the sea only yards away made him want to run from the menace of oblivion to their cozy, lighted, underfurnished house."
Roth has written of mortality before. He addressed the topic with pathos in his award-winning memoir Patrimony and with hysterical humor in his novel Sabbath's Theater. The last line of that book read: "How could he leave? How could he go? Everything he hated was here." Everyman has none of these hyperbolically funny flourishes. "It's extremely dark," says Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mark Strand, a friend of Roth's for more than 40 years. "And really unalleviated by the usual high jinks and humor that Roth is able to inject into novels."
It will be interesting to see whether Roth's readers will follow him into this dark territory. Roth's previous novel, The Plot Against America, reportedly sold 10 times as many copies in hardcover as the books that preceded it. Grateful but chagrined, Roth refuses to let this fact buoy him.
"Well, it doesn't change my opinion of the cultural facts," he says, brow furrowing. "If it's this book or Joan Didion's book [that] strikes the fancy of people, it doesn't change the fact that reading is not a source of sustenance or pleasure for a group that used to read for both."
Consideration of such factors have never changed what Roth has written. "I write the piece from beginning to end," he says, explaining how he works "in drafts, enlarging it from within, which means I tend not to work by adding on. I have the story, and what I find I need to develop is stuff within the story that gives it the punch, that thickens the interest."
When Roth reaches a point where he can do no more work, he takes the manuscript to three or four early readers, whom he does not name. "And then I'll go and sit down with them for three or four hours, however long it takes, and listen to what they have to say. For much of it I don't say anything. Whatever they say is useful. Because what I'm getting is somebody else's language about my book. That's what's useful. What they do is break the book open, they shatter it, and I can go back in for one last attack."
Novelist Paul Theroux, who read the novel "in one sitting," and then again "with even more pleasure and admiration," says Roth's careful consideration of his story's effect shines through. "Something I admire greatly is Roth's apparent casualness—in reality his effects are carefully built up." In this case, Roth's ability to work without his usual stunts is what makes the novel so impressive to Theroux. "Its power arises from its persuasive detail, its fully realized and recognizable people, their weaknesses especially."
In the past, Roth has written autobiographically enough that it is tempting to confuse him with his characters—and their weaknesses, too. During the '60s, when his blockbuster novel Portnoy's Complaint was racking up nearly half a million copies in sales, even Jacqueline Susann, author of Valley of the Dolls, said drolly that she would like to meet him but wasn't sure she'd like to shake his hand.
Everyman has its share of Roth moments—Everyman is remarkably virile into his 70s, for example—but they tend to be of a tender biographical cast. The opening scene alludes to the funeral of Roth's close friend and literary mentor, Saul Bellow, who died in 2005. Later in the book, after several operations, Roth's character calls some of his close friends who are ill themselves to say goodbye to them.
Finally, in a scene likely to go down as one of Roth's most affecting yet, the character visits the grave of his two parents and meets the man who probably dug their graves. "That is almost certainly based on Roth's experience," says Strand. "Nothing is lost on Philip; whatever he can use, he'll use."
Still, it would be a mistake to think that Roth is contemplating the end with shaky hands. In person, the novelist appears fit and vigorous, arriving to the interview with a duffel bag like a man who has just returned from the Y. His gaze is powerful and intense. Death still does not frighten him. "[This book] wasn't on my mind because of my own death, which I don't think is—I hope isn't—imminent," he says, laughing. Even when Roth had open-heart surgery in 1988, he didn't think twice about the end. "Well, I never believed I would expire. I was pretty sure these guys knew what they were doing, that they would fix me up, and they did."
"He's had physical setbacks," Strand says, "but he began much stronger and more athletic than the rest of us. When I met him he was a terrific ballplayer, he could hit the ball a mile. And intellectually, he's one of the most alert people I've ever met."