The great equalizer

PHILIP ROTH’S creations tend to travel in schools. Here we have the Zuckerman books, here the Kepesh books, and over there the Roth books -- the most slippery and scintillating of the bunch. Yet his new novel seems to have wriggled free of these taxonomic confines. The protagonist of “Everyman” is nameless. He also emerges from the straitjacket of family life with none of the Houdini-like exertions so typical of his fictional cousins. Can Roth really be starting from scratch?

Not exactly. Sometimes, you see, size does matter -- and the slender heft of “Everyman,” combined with its funereal jacket, should have been an immediate tip-off. What we have here is a companion piece to “The Dying Animal,” which Roth published in 2001. In that similarly proportioned novel, mortality brings David Kepesh to his knees without actually killing him. In this one, the hero dies -- no spoiler, since he’s being buried in the very first scene. And what really interests Roth this time around is the depersonalization of death. The closer we get to the grave, the more we each shed our singularity and turn into -- well, into Everyman, a creature of flesh and blood and diminishing spirit.

“There was only our bodies,” Roth writes, “born to live and die on terms decided by the bodies that had lived and died before us. If he could be said to have located a philosophical niche for himself, that was it -- he’d come upon it early and intuitively, and however elemental, that was the whole of it. Should he ever write an autobiography, he could call it ‘The Life and Death of a Male Body.’ ”

This is meant to be pragmatic: the body as one more product on the shelf, patiently awaiting its expiration date. But as Roth knows, the consolations of philosophy can be pretty thin. And if the hero of “Everyman” lacks the pungent past of, say, Alexander Portnoy, he’s got more than enough reason to stay alive.

Like what? Well, at age 71, this retired commercial artist has already burned his way through three marriages and, like Kepesh, has endured the hatred of his male offspring, who can’t forgive him for walking out. Yet he does have a devoted daughter from his second marriage, a beloved brother and the memories of an ideal childhood, which revolve around his father’s tiny jewelry store in Elizabeth, N.J.

The hero and his older brother, Howie, used to work at the shop in their spare time. Occasionally, the younger sibling would transport tiny bags of diamonds, hiding the precious cargo in his jacket pockets. The gems were, as their father liked to say, imperishable. Yet some of their aura of eternity seems to have rubbed off on the shop itself, a “world as it innocently existed before the invention of death, life perpetual in their father-created Eden, a paradise just fifteen feet wide by forty feet deep disguised as an old-style jewelry store.”

Eden is invariably a stopgap. At 34, wandering the beach at Martha’s Vineyard with his second wife-to-be, the hero has his first close encounter with mortality: “The profusion of stars told him unambiguously that he was doomed to die, and the thunder of the sea only yards away -- and the nightmare of the blackest blackness beneath the frenzy of the water -- made him want to run from the menace of oblivion to their cozy, lighted, underfurnished house.”

After this premonitory panic, he enjoys another two decades of health and erotic vigor. These the author sketches out over just a few dozen pages. Still, the cards are on the table; “Everyman” is anything but a bright book of life. It’s about letting go.

As the blackest blackness draws near, Roth records the symptoms with appalling precision: the fear, the fading vitality and what he calls “prolonged illness’s deadliest trap, the contortion of one’s character.” In the grip of this very trap, the hero drives away his beloved brother. Here we face the cruelest paradox of all: Before death irons out the spiky irregularities of personality, it turns them into a kind of poison. This is bitter news, bad news -- but it takes a master like Roth, operating at the top of his game, to deliver it so effectively.

And how are we to swallow it? More than once, we hear the protagonist’s stoical motto: “There’s no remaking reality.” True enough, as a mantra and stress-management tool. Surely, however, there’s an ironic underpinning to such a statement when it appears in a book by Philip Roth. Remaking reality -- toying with it, tampering with it, daring the reader to find the factual needles in his fictional haystacks -- is what this author does.

It should come as no surprise, then, that a brief scene in “Everyman” overlaps precisely with one in “The Facts,” Roth’s single stab at autobiography. In both cases, the hero has nearly died of acute peritonitis. Both are eager to leave the hospital for fear of missing the entire autumn and are chided by the doctor in identical words: “Don’t you get it yet? You almost missed everything.”

You can practically see the glint in the author’s eye as he shares this reprieve with his clueless character. There’s a quick merger of art and existence, then the two go their separate ways again. The hero is discharged, a fatality waiting to happen. As for Roth, he seems to have missed almost nothing since he left the hospital in 1967, and to judge from this painful, potent book, he’s got plenty of life in him yet. *