Everyman

I must admit that I first became attracted to this book because of its cover. A teal-blue-green with an open clock on the front, it was very aesthetic, simple and reserved. The title, too, Everyman, a clear allusion to the medieval morality play in which Everyman tries to avoid Death. I thought, I would like to read a book about one man’s fear of mortality. [I have a thing for tragedies.]

It wasn’t beautiful and sweeping because the protagonist’s life was not beautiful and sweeping. The short book (less than two hundred pages, a novella perhaps) has no action or ‘plot’ in the Hollywood sense. From the title alone you realize the protagonist will die, and he does, and all the story’s events happen in the past. Is it even an interesting life? I don’t know. He was not a particularly admirable person, just a person. He was Everyman.

Some lovely motifs–clocks and the sea, indicated by the well-designed cover. I don’t mean to say that you can deduce the book from its cover, but Everyman delivers exactly what it promises. It put me in mind of a book or article I read about Anne Tyler, something about the novel ‘of the middle years.’ Tyler writes about middle age :: Roth writes about the endgame. I enjoyed it, but the game does end.

Malapropisms

At work yesterday, a woman asked me if we had craft magazines, so I showed her where they were.  She asked me if we could order magazines, but I told her no, only books.  As I was walking away, I heard her say to her friend, “Well, I guess that’s all right because you can always get a magazine prescription.”  A slip of the tongue that really isn’t all that off when you think on it.

This morning I brushed my hair and threw away my hairbrush.  (O where is my hairbrush.)  Just like that–brush, toss.  I stared at the brush lying there a moment, uncomprehending, then fished it out of the trash.  A slip of the hand?  Why do we do things that we have no explanation for?

And then there was one.  I can already feel myself wandering around the empty house, checking the rooms to make sure they’re still the way they were when I checked them last.  I haven’t lived really, truly, all-by-myself alone ever.  I hope I will not turn into a slip of the mind.  It should be quite interesting.