‘Everyman’ lacks depth of character

“Everyman”

by Philip Roth (Houghton Mifflin, 182 pages, $24)

The title character in Philip Roth’s new novel is a fickle, feckless, horny, self-pitying cipher – which may be exactly what Roth intended him to be. But that doesn’t mean the book works.

Taking its inspiration from the medieval morality play of the same name, “Everyman” is a striking contrast to “The Plot Against America,” Roth’s boldly imagined 2004 alternative history/family saga.

Small in scale and narrow in its focus, it portrays a thrice-divorced father who has a daughter still loyal to him (from his second marriage) and two sons who bitterly resent him (from his first marriage). The book opens with his funeral, then flashes back to review his life.

Roth closely follows the arc of the medieval play, in which Death comes calling for a flawed, hapless, ordinary fellow, prompting him to reassess his life. The play, of course, was a morality lesson, not a psychological study. The surprise here – and the problem – is that Roth shows equally little interest in presenting us with three-dimensional characters. What we get instead are shallow caricatures, starting with the title character himself.

A Jewish New Yorker and would-be artist, Roth’s Everyman went into the advertising business to please his parents, and he has regretted it ever since. In marriage, he has been just as wrongfooted, hooking up first with a shrew whom he seems always to have detested, then with a saint he cruelly betrayed, and finally with a bubbleheaded Danish model half his age who “carried everything erotic to the limit.”

Along with his moral flaws, Roth’s Everyman is a sickly type. By the time he reaches his 60s, he’s jealously envious of his older brother’s good health, thus poisoning that relationship.

True, his health problems are real. It’s also true that Roth is going for a big protest against “the inevitable onslaught that is the end of life.” But for that “onslaught” to have any dramatic effect, Everyman’s life would need to be populated by something other than stick figures.

Roth does get certain moments right: a resentful son’s anger-strangled wave of grief at his father’s graveside; a serene exchange, late in the book, between Everyman and a gravedigger about the practice of the latter’s trade.

Still, nothing here can help the novel transcend its central flaw: the fact that its characters never take on more than a cartoonish weight.