WARNING: Everyman Spoiler

The words spoken by the bones made him feel buoyant and indestructible. So did the hard-won subjugation of his darkest thoughts. Nothing could extinguish the vitality of the boy whose slender little torpedo of an unscathed body once rode the big Atlantic waves from a hundred yards out in the wild ocean all the way to the shore. Oh, the abandon of it, and the smell of the salt and the scorching sun! Daylight, he thought, penetrating everywhere, day after summer day of that daylight blazing off a living sea, an optical treasure so vast and valuable that he could have been peering through the jeweler’s loupe engraved with his father’s initials at the perfect, priceless planet itself – at his home, the billion-, the trillion-, the quadrillion-carat planet Earth! He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he feared from the start.

- - -- - - - - - - - - - - - -- -- - - - - - -- -- - - - -- -- - - -- -

I finished EVERYMAN (blog won’t italicize although it may psychadelicize…sorry Chamber’s Brothers) today. Roth’s book about the life and death of a male body is the first novel I’ve read in years. Call me stupid people but a big part of my job for a long time was to read the Republic, Tocqueville, Nietzsche, the Constitution and a bunch of other shit over and over so I could come to them with a fresh perspective and try to provide some sort of intellectual guidance for other people’s children through some of our most sacred questions. I never had time for silly things like novels where I could take the more immediate inspiration of others and mix it with my own.

That time in my life is over, at least for awhile. I can’t tell you the pleasure that raced through my bones as I took in the pages and the life, and the impending death of Roth’s everyman. I feel like I have just picked up a cigarette again and it feels good.

I finished that last paragraph on my lunch and cried upon reaching the end. Roth’s everyman has a visceral understanding of what life is for him, what it seems to be worth, and what he is in the process of losing as his body suffers the decline that comes with a bad heart and old age.

I cried in part because of what everyman realized right before he lost everything. But I also cried because of what I took back. I took back that part of my mind, that sense or longing to be taught with a story that I had not analyzed with teachers and students for years. I took back the freshness of reading a new book, experiencing it for the first time and the sensual and sublime pleasures great writers lend us so freely.

Thanks to Grant Miller who mentioned Roth’s book in his response to one of my many stupid Soprano’s posts. He reminded me that I wanted to read this book since it came out last year. I almost said no to a class just to have blow off time to begin reading earlier.

The biggest thanks go to Mr. Roth himself:


Your book is a gift to all of us sir. We can never repay you.

AMERICAN PASTORAL is next.