Books: Death Be Not Mundane

It is to Roth's credit that he cannot quite bring himself to write a book as dull and flat as Everyman's concept seems to demand. His style repeatedly breaks its leash, as at the funeral, when the protagonist's brother gives a moving eulogy and his estranged son struggles violently against unbidden grief. But then the narrator interjects that there had been 500 funerals in New Jersey that day and that except for the aforementioned moments, this one was "no more or less interesting than any of the others." It's an astonishing passage: an author arguing, against the evidence of his own prose, that a scene he has crafted is nothing special.

Roth is too well attuned a writer to win this argument. His protagonist's memories of his boyhood are crystalline: "He ran home barefoot and wet and salty, remembering the mightiness of that immense sea boiling in his own two ears and licking his forearm to taste his skin fresh from the ocean and baked by the sun." And Roth conjures an understated, haunting set piece in which the man visits the cemetery and chats with the affable worker who will soon dig his grave. These are glimpses of the Everyman whose story would have been more powerful had Roth made him more than merely an every body.