Everything he hated was here

Philip Roth’s latest novels, Everyman and Exit Ghost, can be read in two sittings. Only Everyman is worth the time.

Everyman tells the story of a nameless protagonist, thrice a father and thrice divorced, who loses a fight against cancer. He is the younger brother to successful Howie, and was the loving son of two Elizabeth, NJ denizens. The novel is furious in its pace – it starts with the dead protagonists funeral, and then works back over childhood horrors and triumphs, and routes our Everyman through his work life and his relationships. Roth slams home the pain of disease and the love of lust as a break out of the mundane. When our hero, then 50 years old, nails his foxy face down, ass high 19 year old secretary on in his office, we cheer for the man. But when he marries one of the tarts he can’t keep from balling, we see that he’s undone by something not missing from the latter stages of middle age, but from longer term issues. There are passages where Everyman unloads on the sons who do not forgive him for abandoning their mother, and where he rages against his beloved older brother for having the nerve to exist disease free. Roth calls this outstanding read one of his “Other novels” (ie, not related to Roth, Zuckerman, or Kepesh) and this is the first of said distinction since Sabbath’s Theater, his best book.

Exit Ghost starts off promising then dissolves into a few lazy characteristics that marred The Plot Against America. Nathan Zuckerman is ensconced in Western MA, going about his seclusion with the addition of diapers. He’s been incontinent for 10 years as the book opens, and he seeks out surgery/treatment back in NYC, where he hasn’t been for years. He stumbles across an ad in the NYROB and finds a young couple with an apartment for swap. Billy and Jamie are looking to get away to the country for a year, and Zuckerman is looking to ball the daylights out of Jamie, a raven haired honey 40 years his junior. The book is fun and modern, and the counter story, that of Zuck running into Amy Bellette, who he first met years ago at EI Lonoff’s house and thought to re-imagine as Anne Frank still alive. Roth breaks the story with imagined, flirtatious dialogue between himself and Jamie, and it is fun for a bit, but turns to a dramatic drag. I think he meant this as something akin to the best footnote ever written, that transcript in Sabbath’s Theater, but also as a device for redemption, something the soiled man of 71 can’t achieve anymore. The best parts of the book are when Roth gets into the suicide of a friendly neighbor, and the reminiscing of Amy’s horror in flight from the Nazis. The coda has some fine moments too but feels disjointed from the rest of the book.