(no subject)

[proximoception]

Not sure whether I recommend Everyman, though the second half is very powerful and there are some striking phrases. In many stretches, especially early on, it seemed more oppressive than poignant, more traumatized than wise. Anyway, Roth is great with funerals and has probably usurped graveyards away from Shakespeare himself, but I hope this is a culmination. How can it not be? He's done death to itself, surely that's a short circuit. I guess he could write a first-person forty page novella called Death set in a hospital bed, with a ninety-year-old ogling his nurse and listing different agonies. And something after that with no nurse even, but that's Beckett territory.

Is it just too much for me, at my age? I loved all the lead-ups: the Zuckerman moribund scenes, Patrimony, the best writing of our age in Sabbath's Theater's final third, the reunion at the beginning of American Pastoral, the brother in I Married a Communist, even Dying Animal (practically a first draft of Everyman, but with a shamanistic death-by-proxy). Maybe for pre-middle-agers there's something narratively unacceptable about a "Guy Dies--Details Follow" structure. Or maybe Roth's powers are finally starting to flag. Sad irony if so. Or maybe the subject matter, tackled finally completely head-on, and moreso even than Tolstoy managed (with his ideological oven mits), just can't be pinned down long enough to bless anything.

Or it might be the kind of book that comes to mean more to me a while after. Unsettling ones are sometimes like that.