"Diluting the Canon"

Everyman by Philip Roth

Perhaps 'Diluting the Canon' is too harsh. Many other reviewers have called Roth’s 27^th novel a masterpiece, a highly ambitious undertaking, and a book that is at once familiar and new (Publisher’s Weekly and The Washington Post’s Book World). But I cannot help but think this book, for all its ambition, is nothing more than a failed experiment, one that ultimately brings Roth no closer to his dreams of finally winning the one major prize that has still eluded him: The Nobel Prize.

The book, in many ways, is at least a structural success. We start at the funeral of our protagonist where three of the mourners express their sadness: the man’s daughter, an ex-wife, and older brother. From there, Roth takes us back in time to various points in the deceased’s life, including his childhood spent working with his brother in his father’s jewelry and watch store, a term in the Navy, multiple failed marriages and affairs, and most importantly, his many visits to the hospital. Roth refers to his protagonist as an ‘average man,’ in the hopes of somehow capturing a regular, maybe even normal, American existence. Yet Roth’s novel ultimately focuses to the point of obsession on the frailty of the human body. The protagonist’s life is framed by his many hospital visits, from a hernia operation to multiple procedures meant to clear out blocked arteries and other issues that arise throughout his body. At one point, the character has seven straight years with a major procedure. With the constant referencing and focus spent on detailing a person’s mortality, one can’t help but wonder if this is something Roth himself fears. I often find that at some point every writer has to produce something about human frailty and the weakness of the human body. Is this Roth’s attempt? Like Woolf, is he haunted by some end fast approaching? Or is this merely a book about a man and the slow process of dying. The title seems to provide both an answer and a great problem that goes unreconciled: if this is the story of an everyman, why the long diatribes focusing only on health and vigor. Are we meant to judge and eventually pity this man who cheated and failed in most aspects of his life? If this were a novel driven solely by plot and characterization, none of these things would be at issue. Yet here, where we are almost put on the spot to judge the outcome of this man’s life, set up masterfully by the funeral opening, we have to look at least on a more than superficial level at the judgments one inevitably comes to when you read a book by Roth, someone whose novels have always carried a certain political and moral charge to them. What we’re left with after weighing the thin book is not much of anything, really.

If this book was meant to somehow make Roth’s case for the Nobel that much stronger, I am sad to say that it has failed. The structure, the strongest, yet also the most flawed aspect of the novel, never allows us to care about the protagonist and what has happened to him, meaning that at no point do we ever reflect on some of the obvious fears we all share concerning our own mortality, something the novel seems to drive at from the very beginning. The ending seems too compact, a little too neat and tidy in that we are finally brought back to the operation that ends his life. There’s something too artificial in it and it really detracts from many of the weighty issues Roth sounds off on.

I will finish by saying that this is simply a book to read if you have nothing more pressing or urgent calling to you from the long list of books sitting on your bookshelf.

Some interesting quotes:

“As my father told us, when a pretty young woman wears a piece of jewelry, other women think that when they wear the piece of jewelry they’ll look like that too.”

“Now he sat beside her on the bed and took her hand in his, thinking: When you are young, it’s the outside of the body that matters, how you look externally. When you get older, it’s what’s inside that matters, and people stop caring how you look.”