Old Age and Roth's Everyman

I've now read five of the over twenty-five novels that Roth has written: the coarsely sexual (not a bad thing, btw) Portnoy's Complaint, the scathingly satirical Our Gang, the oddly surreal The Breast,  the dizzily metafictional Operation: Shylock (my favorite so far), and now Everyman, a short meditation on the life and preoccupation by death of an American Everyman.   With each new novel, I'm amazed that such a different book could be written by the same author.  The man is a master.

The novel begins at a funeral as family and a handful of friends and colleagues offer their admittedly inadequate words for the passing of a retired advertising executive. From there, we are taken back through his life, through a string of wives, affairs, diagnoses, surgeries, and ill or departed friends.  Like the 15th-century allegory's Everyman—who has, as the play's full title announces, been summoned by Death—Roth's everyman, who remains unnamed throughout the novel, moves inexorably toward that opening funeral.

Unlike the Everyman of the allegorical play, who discovered that at least Good Works would accompany him as he met his Maker, Roth's everyman does not discover any core that accompanies him, or anyone else, beyond the terrible moment of death.  In one part of the narrative, he learns that three of his acquaintances are either dead, dying, or institutionalized, and calls widow or friend to offer what comfort he can.  At the end of these conversations, he despairs at how banal and limited these conversations were:

Yet what he'd learned was nothing when measured against the inevitable onslaught that is the end of life. Had he been aware of the mortal suffering of every man and woman he happened to have known during all his years of professional life, of each one's painful story of regret and loss and stoicism, of fear and panic and isolation and dread, had he learned of every last thing they had parted with that had once been vitally theirs and of how, systematically, they were being destroyed, he would havehad to stay on the phone through the day and into the night, making another hundred calls at least. Old age isn't a battle; old age is massacre.

In the end, I'm reminded of Keats's negative capability, the ability to accept contradictory notions without feeling the need to resolve them.  Everyman does this for me; the inevitability and, at times, terror of death exist along with moments of tenderness and gentle memory.  Neither extreme is attenuated by the other, though they are both somehow changed.  Death is what it is, and it is everything we fear.  But until we die, we live.