REVIEW: Philip Roth’s Everyman
February 3rd, 2009 by Menachem Wecker
I recently finished rereading Philip Roth’s Everyman (HMH, 2006) and thoroughly enjoyed it. Roth’s (anonymous) main character is Jewish, and spends his final days painting, but Roth does not really connect the two.
In fact, the only really Jewish spaces in the book are cemeteries, and one gets the impression that Roth is more interested in how Jews die than how they live.
The everyman starts teaching a painting class at his retirement home hoping to pick up women, but the plan backfires, and he grows bored of painting the same thing over and over. Roth writes:
As a painter he was and probably always had been no more than the “happy cobbler” he happened to know he’d been dubbed by the satirical son. It was as though painting had been an exorcism. But designed to expel what malignancy? The oldest of his self-delusions? Or had he run to painting to attempt to deliver himself from the knowledge that you are born to live and you die instead.
I wish Roth had spent more time addressing the act of painting, rather than simply dismissing it as a craft which is the last refuge of the dying. But that would not have fit into the book’s larger themes, which touch upon aging, about loneliness, and ultimately about dying. The everyman is not a particularly likable character, but I found it hard to not feel sorry for him, and more painfully, to project myself onto him.