Grave Memoir

Philip Roth8217;s slim novel catches all the themes and images of earlier works

IT IS DIFFICULT NOT TO RECALL Gabriel Garcia Marquez8217;s Memories of My Melancholy Whores while reading this slim new novel from Philip Roth. In the seemingly abrupt inwardness and the strikingly spare-ness of their plotlines, both announce a stocktaking by the masters. They are, in the nicest sense of that word, indulgences. They challenge their creators to gather, in these simplest of storylines, all the preoccupations and themes of their writing lives. The title, Everyman, is taken from a 15th-century allegorical play, in which the hero, upon intimation of imminent death, must account for the rights and wrongs of his life. So it is with the early 21st-century man at the heart of this novel.

In fact, the book opens with his funeral al-ready in slow progress. There they are, all of them assembled around his grave: his 40- something sons, who have spent their angry lives in estrangement from a father divorced messily from their mother; his daughter from his second marriage, she who has under-stood him most; her mother and his second wife, who vaults over old hurts to pay tribute; his advertising colleagues; his neighbours from a retirement colony where he found creative fulfillment teaching art; and most important, his older brother, the hero of his childhood, his enduring connect with his Jewish upbringing in New Jersey as the child of a jeweller.

A moment often occurs in a Roth novel. But it passes so imperceptibly that one has to turn back the pages to know how it hap-pened. So it is in Everyman. With the last of the mud shoveled in over the coffin, the story passes to the everyman of the title.

His is a life punctuated by illness and surgery, each bout, starting with a teenage hospitalisation, bringing forebodings about death and mortality. Like all of Roth8217;s men, he seeks to stave off that inevitability by nurtur-ing creativity and desire. But it is in the telling of his post-war childhood that the book finds its centre of gravity. It is, of course, a return to fa-miliar terrain for his readers, in the making of a new American generation from the austere comforts of family and opportunity. In the caring detail provided of the diamond trade that took his family from the desperation of recent immigration to self-assured participa-tion in American affairs.

And, of course, in the fragmentation of community life at the turn of the century, that asks individuals to look deeply inward to find the scaffolding to sustain a settled sense of self. It is a plot mapped on this body: 8220;The son of long-lived parents, the brother of a man six years his senior who was seemingly as fit as he8217;d been when he8217;d carried the ball for Thomas Jefferson High, he was still only in his 60s when his health began giving way and his body seemed threatened all the time. He8217;d married three times, had mistresses and chil-dren and an interesting job where he8217;d been a success, but now eluding death seemed to have become the central business of his life and bodily decay his entire story.8221;

It is a story that comes, right at the end, with the unexpected twist, almost a wink from the stern-expressioned writer. That, you could say, is the greatest accomplishment.