Everyman

*Everyman* is on the shortlist of the most depressing books I've ever read. It's also one of the most beautiful. Unflinchingly, brutally honest. Courageous. It took a lot of fortitude to write this book--it takes just as much to read it.

The novel opens at a funeral. From the first sentence you understand: the "hero" of the book is dead. The remainder of the novel is the story of his life. It's a life of no great consequence or distinction, a life such as so many others have lived and will live, the life of "everyman": he's born, he makes painful mistakes, he takes pleasure in what he can, he suffers the inevitable loss of it all--his health, his loved ones, the past and any future--and then he dies. Oblivion, forever.

We are born to live, but die instead, Roth grimly observes. There's nothing--to the clear-eyed realist who refuses to believe in babytalk and fairytales, ie. religion, to sugarcoat the truth: we are nothing but this body--and it doesn't last long. We start to lose this precious flesh even while living in it--age and disease eventually taking a stranglehold and robbing us even as we watch. There's nothing we can do about it. Nowhere to turn for justice. "There's no re-making reality," Roth writes. Though we often close our eyes in our despair and try.

*Everyman* is written with a spare elegance that lends it the music and power of myth. Think Hemingway's *The Old Man and the Sea* or Tolstoy's *The Death of Ivan Illych.* It's a book that might have been written by a modern-day Ecclesiastes--maybe it was. Roth says it plain, if in different words: "All is vanity and yet it's better to be a living dog than a dead lion." Fact is, we're not even given the choice. We all die either way, most of us dogs.

Roth doesn't offer any easy answers in *Everyman.* He doesn't offer any hard answers either. There is no answer--and that dread dead silence you hear is the answer no one wants to hear coming back from the great beyond. We fill it with babble, Bibles, and babies. Roth, to his credit, let's that silence speak for itself.

Whatever the eventual fate of Roth's other work, this small book will remain a classic and it will be a classic so long as human beings are born and die. And perchance they ever find a cure for death, the lucky immortals will still be reading *Everyman* the way we read *Uncle Tom's Cabin,* a remembrance of an abolished and unthinkable horror no one can believe could ever have been endured.

Ever since Philip Roth chose to live in seclusion his production has grown immensely. Roth has chosen to dedicate himself totally to his writing. Feeling producing good literature is the best he can do with his time. Even though this self chosen seclusion cuts him of from a lot of every day experiences we all have, usually basic material for a writer, his writing has actually improved, has become more focused.

Philip Roth's latest novel is no exception. His writing is as always imaginative stripping the characters down to the bone. With Roth there is never the guessing what moves his characters, Roth will explain, in detail. Phillip Roth does this with such mastery of language that even in his most detailed description his novels never dull, they always keep pace. Roth never fails to deliver.

His latest novel deals with a subject fairly uncommon in literature. Roth chronicles the disease history of his character. We start this novel at the characters funeral and are subsequently taken through his various diseases and illnesses in life. "Twenty years pass" Roth writes at one point. In these twenty years the character is not sick, so he's not interesting. Of course through his reminisces we get some picture of how his life has been. These images often deal with his virility as a stark contrast of his disease. All the usual style elements of Roth's other novels are here.

The novel is interwoven with the Jewish experiences, the character goes through various marriages in life and there is the unease in human relations. All very familiar for the regular Roth reader. They are the foundation and cement of all his novels. Old age and illness are no strangers in Roth's novels either, but to my knowledge he's one of the few writers that dare to confront our mortality and the frailty of life so directly. This alone makes Roth one of America's most accomplished writers.

Heard the taped version of EVERYMAN by Philip Roth, a short but

powerful novel that begins with the protagonist's death . . . it then

shifts backward through his life, which included three marriages,

an advertising career and numerous health problems.

Naturally, it being a book by Roth, there's some sex thrown

in for good measure.

I kept thinking that much of what I was hearing was Roth

describing his life (or at least large chunks of it), but then again,

I could see bits and pieces of my life too . . . as it has been and,

alas, as it will probably be.

The writing, in many parts, nearly took my breath away . . . it is that

powerful . . . for example, there was this one passage describing

a yearning for the strength and joy of youth:

Nothing could extinguish the vitality of that 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 in to shore. Oh, the

abandon of it, and the smell of the salt water 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!

It is now several days since I finished EVERYMAN, but I still find

myself thinking about it--always a good sign that a book moved me.

This one certainly did.

George Guidall ably handled the narration . . . listening, it felt

almost as if Roth was speaking directly to me.

In this short, intense novel Roth introduces us to his unique interpretation of the medieval morality play with the same name. Instead of having "everyman" being led by Death to confront God's judgement, Roth's nameless protagonist addresses the reader from his freshly dug grave. Is he asking for acceptance for the bad that outweighed the good or merely indulging in justifying his life and actions?

We meet "him" as the subject during the brief funeral ceremony attended by a handful of "friends" and family. His sons stand aside, clearly not overly affected by his death. The reader gets a sketch of the man from his brother's eulogy and the words of his ex-wife and daughter. All three speak of a long-ago past, his youthful self as a brother in their beloved parents' house, of a happy time with his wife or as a young father. That was when life was innocent and wholesome - before death. The mourners have hardly turned away when the story shifts to the recounting the protagonist`s life.

While Roth maintains a certain distance by writing in the third person, the following retrospective is very intimate and personal to his character. His meandering mind follows the different stages of his life, lingering with specifics and dialogs on some episodes, while brushing aside others that are deemed less important. In life, Roth's Everyman was certainly not your ordinary guy from down the street: he was a successful advertising director, wealthy and accepted by his peers. Abandoning his Jewish faith early on, he concentrated on the materialistic and hedonistic side of life. His three ex-wives were left primarily over his desire for sexual pursuits. Starting in middle age, heart problems became a concern and death lingered in the background. Still, thanks to modern medicine and his finances, he could afford the increasingly necessary heart procedures that brought him into his seventies. As he reflects on his deteriorating body, his unfulfilling leisure in retirement, his nostalgia for the safety and harmony of his parents' life almost overwhelms him as does his admiration for the man he once was. "The force that was mine! ...Once upon a time I was a full human being." The only person standing by him with care and loving in his old age is his daughter. Why is not clear, given that she suffered as much from the departure of her father as the sons did. They never forgave him for abandoning their mother and their reaction is met on his side by hatred and disrespect.

Roth has created a brilliant portrait of a rather unpleasant character. Does Everyman have much in common with the author? This was my first exposure to his themes and preoccupations. Roth's language economy is exquisite and skill in creating atmosphere and characters is at its best. The novel reads extremely well, despite some of the misgivings one might have with the description of "Everyman". [Friederike Knabe]

My title refers to the unnamed protagonist's indirectly expressed (through a fittingly omniscient if humanly bound narrator) thought: "Should he ever write an autobiography, he'd call it 'The Life and Death of a Male Body.' But after retiring he tried becoming a painter, not a writer, and so he gave that title to a series of his abstractions." (52) The fiction may be a bit too abstract, but it's meant to place our universal limits within a particular body, imperfect by nature.

The novel regresses, in reverse after his burial opens the action, back as if he imagines relating his life to "each of the women who had been waiting for him to rise out of the anesthetic in the recovery room." (15) This allows the chronology of his days to unfold, forward erratically but appropriately, as if remembered as a series of vignettes. This does distance a reader considerably from empathy with this often selfish character. But, Roth presents us with a recognizably flawed tragic hero, not a plaster saint or thwarted genius. His Everyman without a name could stand in, and does, for all of us. It may not be a perfect novel because of this verisimilitude, ironically. The uneven emotional states and the dull stretches appear more identifiably real, because Roth refuses to polish or prettify these moments of pain and loss.

The fear grows as the years progress; Millicent Kramer's fate foreshadows his own terribly and movingly. Her decision at the end of her life provides an option akin to that wondered about by Hamlet, who wondered about "the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns." This quote does not appear, but a witty aside to Hamlet does, mouthed by the bitter wife who's thrown over as the protagonist's lusts overcome his commonsense and his family's unity is shattered by his own desire and deceit. He lies that he only visited his mistress to break up with her, and that she cried "the whole four nights" (of their tryst):"That's a lot of crying for a twenty-four-year-old Dane. I don't even think Hamlet cried that much." (119-120)

The protagonist's sons do not appear in a good light. But, the book is presented, during the character's life, from his indirect point-of-view. This obliquity forces us to side with him even as we try to separate ourselves from his foibles. He gets defensive, as any of us would in telling our own side of our life's story. Roth takes this reflex and works it subtly into his novel.

The two sons resent his abandoning their mother for this Danish model, who's not even half his age of fifty. They are briefly evoked as "children who by their nature could not understand there might be more than one explanation to human behavior--children, however, with the appearance and aggression of men, and against whose undermining he could never manage to make a solid defense. They elected to make the absent father suffer, and so he did, investing them with that power." (97) It's a twist perhaps on Lear, too, a masculine alternative. Roth underplays this aspect, but one does get the sense that some of the loneliness and isolation is self-inflicted. This jars the chance that the character thinks he has to bed a twenty-something woman he flirts with on his seaside stroll; it does for me spoil the mood of the book when the man assumes that from early manhood into his fifties he could have any woman he wanted any time. You get the often romanticized wish fulfillment of many writers, not to mention we readers, projected here, which does appear sadly to be belied by the life experiences of many of us ordinary men! I guess that's why they call it fiction.

But libido declines, and the memories stubbornly persist. This is what we fear about our aging, after all. He wonders: "was the best of old age just that--the longing for the best of boyhood"? (126) The distance between him and his Newark past, the Jewish heritage of his youth and his own detachment and perhaps total rejection, bothered me. I wondered as I neared the close if this would return as a thread to be tied into the weaving of the narrative arc. In a scene that risks sentimentalizing, and perhaps hints at what's been derided as the appearance of "the Magic Negro," the character meets at his parents' gravesite a middle-aged gravedigger. Again, although unmentioned, Hamlet's ghosts flittered for me. Roth always likes to incorporate in his fiction engrossing detail of how a craft is carried out; I think of his extended take on glovemaking in one novel among his recent Zuckerman trilogy.

Here, the cemetery worker shows how we open up and then close over what the main figure thinks of as "the brutality of burial and the mouth full of dust." (166) This suffuses the later, desperate, pages of the novel with a needed softness. I welcomed the scene, identifying both with the fear of the elderly Jews mourning their loss and being targeted by muggers even in daylight, and the slow subsiding of the ground and the toppling of the headstones as the earth shifted and the visitors dwindled. It's a powerful evocation of both the inevitable forgetting of those who came before us and of the end of the Jewish presence in that little patch near the exit to Newark Airport.

It's a neighborhood Roth in his fiction often recalls, and his character here follows suit, even as the curtain prepares to fall. "But now it appeared that like any number of the elderly, he was in the process of becoming less and less and would have to see his aimless days through to the end as no more than he was--the aimless days and uncertain nights and the impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing. This is how it works out, he thought, this is what you could not know." (161) Roth attempts to enter the "undiscovered country." But even he, as you will read in the last sentences, cannot return and report beyond the poignant and appropriate ending. It's one that we all wish we could escape.

P.S. A necessary book to read, if in its honesty a painful one. As this was on the public library's new book shelf the day that my father-in-law died, and as I had been wanting to read it even as I feared a bit doing so, I took it as a sign. Still, I postponed my finishing it it yesterday as I did not want to close my eyes on its final page. I waited until the next day to conclude and write this review.

This potent little book may not be for someone approaching old age and death timidly or for the young and still immortal. It pulls back the curtain and reveals the nasty fact that, as we may be identified by our professions in our prime, in old age, we are the sum of our physical afflictions, and everyone is in for it.

The book takes about two hours to read, and it's Roth story-telling stripped down to the bare essentials. He is feeling his own mortality, and, being a writer, is getting it off his chest with the tools that fit his hand best.

Readers who allow themselves to be distracted by the fact that the protagonist cheated on his wives and made some bad marital decisions are either trying to lessen the impact of what Roth is telling them or just miss the point. It's like pretending that the New York Trade Center disaster is not as bad as it could be because some of the fatalities were people who cheated on their wives or on their income taxes.

At one hundred eighty-two pages, Philip Roth's twenty-seventh book may appear diminutive and can, in fact, be read quickly---if one devours books rather than reflects on their content. Such an attitude would be difficult to sustain in the face of the sobering subject, in this case, the downhill slide towards death that is the inevitable end of the book's title. (Thankfully, Roth hasn't fallen prey to the politically correct mandate against gender specific nouns that might have resulted in dreadful constructions like "Everyman/ Woman," "Every Person" or "Every Being.") The fact that "Everyman" is also the title of a fifteenth century morality tract doesn't hurt either. It adds an additional dollop of timelessness.

Moving backwards from the opening cemetery scene where the unnamed protagonist is attended by those with whom he once shared significant portions of his life, the story recounts the various ways in which he managed to fail each of these people. It is an awareness that overtakes him only as he ages, begins to suffer from deteriorating health, finds himself alone, and loses interest even in the lifelong dream of artistic expression. He was not an evil man, or even a cruel one, simply a creature who chose to swim parallel to the shore, compromising with the rip tides of life. If he was guilty of anything, it was of failing to consider his immediate circumstances and whether he should aggressively attempt to impose his own will on them. Should he have tried to explain his mistakes to the two sons from his first marriage who remain lost to him? Why did he allow middle-aged passion to sweep him to where he destroyed his most supportive relationship? His benign ineptness is further magnified by the shadow of an older, apparently flawless brother who swoops in to assist with amazing frequency. That this brother is a creature blessed with unflagging health, kindness and financial success, only serves to embitter the central character.

While many of the painful realizations Roth's character reaches relate to his particular misconduct, the point must be taken that waiting until the end of life to evaluate one's performance---or even whether one has developed suitable standards by which to live---hardly leaves time for adjustment or improvement. Perhaps that is the saddest lesson of all, the realization that wrongs can no longer be undone, that there is no time left to become someone we ourselves consider admirable.

There is a distinct terror in remembering the empowerment of being young, strong and involved with the pleasures of life, while simultaneously recognizing that such feelings have become the speck on a remote horizon. Roth skillfully encapsulates this in phrases such as, "Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre" and "...his longing for the last great outburst of everything" and "Was himself now nothing...but a motionless cipher awaiting the blessing of an eradication that was absolute." He is a master at recreating the imagery and subtle flavoring of a specific segment of society (hardworking, Jewish middle-class tradesman) at a specific time (1930s and on) and in a specific locale (New Jersey). He does it as well in this slim volume as he did on the broad canvas of "American Pastoral."

Obviously, this is not a book for children, although that depends on what age one believes marks the end of childhood. If high school sits at the gates of adulthood, then those years might be the ideal age at which to consider some of the many things that can go wrong. Of course, at sixteen or seventeen we are convinced that mortality only happens to others or in video games, so the effect is bound to be far less than profound. If nothing else, juniors and seniors would appreciate its lean profile. That it becomes a weighty tome by way of its succinctness will likely elude them. That is unfortunate. The rest of us are becoming aware all too quickly of the inescapable melancholy truths listed in "Everyman."

Roth's latest very slim novel Everyman is certainly a bleak sort of a yarn, which begins at the unnamed protagonist's funeral and flashes us back to his final year or so, with some recollections of his younger days thrown in for good measure. This "everyman" is typically Rothian in several superficial ways--secular Jew in NY/NJ setting, oversexed, a little arrogant--but this version veers precipitously toward the morose.

Although now in his seventies, facing recurrent health problems, and feeling puposeless and impotent, the protagonist, for lack of a better name, finds some solace in remembering his past, but at the same time these wistful remembrances just serve to reinforce how acutely he senses his decline. From the reader's perspective, he doesn't come across as entirely likable, as he is equipped with the omnivorous male heterosexual libido so customary in Roth's canon. One scene describes the guy bonking his secretary (and "bonk" here is the all too appropriate word) in his ad agency office only to be gently prodded by his boss to take it outside. These are the types of "hijinks" that usually weaken Roth's novels: these social caricatures engaging in exaggeratedly archetypal situations.

Meanwhile, the protagonist has variously troubled, problematic, and estranged relationships with his sons, who resent him; his brother, of whom he's quietly jealous; and his ex-wives, who each have their own good reasons for letting him putter through old age alone. Only his apparently saintly daughter from his second marriage (another tired Roth trope), Phoebe, holds any value for him, but in the character's only evidence of altruism he doesn't want her to worry about his deteriorating condition. So he pretty much goes it alone during his final days: taking inventory of his life and finding himself pretty unhappy.

Needless to say, I don't think this is one of Roth's better efforts. It seems to have been written on a downer, which is fine, but it doesn't have much to offer. The protagantist isn't the kind of comprehensive, full-fledged character that we've come to expect from Roth; he seems to be too broadly drawn to inspire any real compassion from readers.

This short novel tells the story of a retired man struggling to live amidst a series of medical emergencies. He is laden with guilt about his three divorces and two sons who despise him, but clings to his daughter, Nancy and her twins who still love him. The former art director turns to painting in his retirement and holds classes for the other residents of his retirement village on the Jersey coast. After one of them dies of an overdose, he wonders how she did it, his own death in the back of his mind at all times. The wealth of attention paid to the medical trauma of the elderly is a theme of the book, with "stent" the main word here. The man has a bunch of them inserted in his body to restore it after surgeries. Another theme is his memories of his parents, including his father who owned a jewelry store and created a good life for his sons. The other one, Howie, is a big success on the West coast who the main character has been close to all his life, but envies for his good health as he nears death. Then there is his sexuality, the marriages giving way to affairs through his work, with a 19-year-old secretary and a 24-year old Dutch model who eventually becomes his third wife. His failure to lead a conventional family life is one of his regrets, yet he continues to pine after attractive young women, even at the retirement village, where he meets a young jogger and gives her his telephone number, but never hears from her again. As Roth nears the age of his "Everyman", his fiction turns to the issues that haunt them, death unfortunately being the main one here.

Interesting book that, as the title implies, describes the life of “Everyman”. There are biographies aplenty about the rich and famous, the accomplished and the villainous but this is arguably the biography of the vast majority of “the rest of us”

marriage, adultery, and divorce read here like passages or stages of life. if marriage is the good, and adultery the transgression, then divorce is the punishment. but how long must the punishment last, eternity and a lifetime, or is eternity enough? well, this tale doesn't seem to be about eternity, but a lifetime up to death and, for the survivors, beyond death, which is still their lifetimes, so why the lingering resentment of the sons? a middle class upbringing with educational opportunities, i agree with their father, get over it, get professional help if you must, but get on with your own lives.

and after divorce(s) and retirement the main character wants to get on with his own life, which becomes a battle against lonliness, illnesses and growing old with grace while all around him other aging persons are in pain and dying.

there's much to say about all of this and roth left me contemplating much and pleased that what may be sketchy in this novel will probably be new territory for the aging roth.
philip roth, like the late james baldwin, is a student of henry james jr, which makes his writing a joy to read, and more oft than not, thought provoking, as is everyman, a small novel i truly enjoyed.

The title of "Everyman," the mordant yet immensely moving 2006 novel by Philip Roth, comes from a medieval play of the same name, and is intended to remind us that aging and death await us all, every man and every woman. In 2009, Roth became the third living American writer to have his work published by the Library of Congress. As I have said before, Philip Roth is the greatest living writer never to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Roth sets the tone for this 192-page novella with an epigraph quoting Keats.

"Here where men sit and hear each other groan; / Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, / Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; / Where but to think is to be full of sorrow."

The novel begins with Everyman's funeral, then skips backward in time to an unvarnished accounting of his life. The protagonist, who remains unnamed throughout, is a 71-year-old retired and materially successful advertising executive who has walked away from two marriages, three children, and his once-revered older brother, leaving him ill-equipped to cope later in life with his decaying body and a series of medical events--appendicitis, two heart surgeries, and various other procedures--that force him to confront his own mortality. His death-and-dying tocsin, though, rings well before his body fails him, at his father's funeral.

"All at once he saw his father's mouth as if there were no coffin, as if the dirt they were throwing into the grave was being deposited straight down onto him, filling up his mouth, blinding his eyes, clogging his nostrils and closing off his ears. He could taste the dirt coating the inside of his mouth well after they had left the cemetery and returned to New York."

Everyman reaches old age and Starfish Beach, the retirement community his infirmities consign him to, cynical and resentful, unshriven (by two adult sons) for cheating on his first wife, unforgiving of the body that betrays him and robs him of his prodigious sexual vigor. Only his daughter from his second marriage remains loyal--as only daughters can. She sees to it that he is buried in a Jewish cemetery alongside his parents, even though he is an atheist, because she " ...didn't want him to be somewhere alone."

The last to pay respects at his funeral is Maureen, a home health nurse who cared for him after his first heart surgery.

"...a battler from the look of her and no stranger to either life or death. When, with a smile, she let the dirt slip slowly across her curled palm and out the side of her hand onto the coffin, the gesture looked like a prelude to a carnal act. Clearly this was a man to whom she'd once given much thought."

And that was that.

"...In a matter of minutes, everybody had walked away--wearily and tearfully walked away from our species' least favorite activity--and he was left behind. Of course, as when anyone dies, though many were grief-stricken, others remained unperturbed, or found themselves relieved, or, for reasons good or bad, were genuinely pleased."

I once recommended--prescribed--this book to a patient, now deceased, who in addition to being on dialysis with kidney failure, had heart disease so severe it was clear to all, my patient included, that he would not survive another year. A fiercely intelligent man, he understood his predicament intellectually, but refused emotionally to accept it. When he grew angry and then despondent, I suggested Everyman, which he agreed to read. He found the protagonist's cynicism and bitterness and lack of grace so contemptible he vowed to die a better way. For the remainder of his life, a few months only, he was notably happier and at peace. Sometimes, only great fiction can tell the truth in a way that is transformative; we humble doctors lack the words.

"Everyman" is a profound adumbration that settles nothing, but fearlessly illuminates everything, leading the reader to a place where confronting death is at least possible. Why do we fear death so? Do the atheists among us fear they are right? And the faithful that they are wrong? And this notion of bodily decay, how to deal with that, our unwanted senescence? Is there no limit to what we are willing to do to forestall it?

Perhaps it is the loss of those we love that we most fear. A different way of saying we fear losing our humanity. But what I have learned from my patients, I think, is that it is the sweetness of life, the intensity, the vividness we fear losing. And that the balm for this fear is to have savored fully all the heavenly ambrosia this mortal world holds.

Before youth grows pale.

Richard Barager, MD, FACP
The Literary Doctor
Author of Altamont Augie

In this short novel, the protagonist trys to explain to himself how he ended up alone, to forgive himself, and to recapture and pay homage to his family life as a child. I had a little difficulty connecting the child to the man, and I wasn't as interested in the child and his family as I would have expected, for which I fault Roth: it makes sense for the character to be sentimental about his youth, but it does not make for good writing. Ditto for the character's preoccupation with medical details.

I was interested in Everyman's account of why he had 3 divorces, and even more in his life as a retired senior citizen who made a bad choice in leaving New York city. Among the events which led to his second divorce is that he hadn't been sleeping with his wife for several years, but given the picture of Phoebe painted, it would have been much easier to accept a much diminished sexual life than no sexual life, so one wonders if facts weren't twisted so Roth could make Everyman more sympathetic.

There is enough honesty and humor, and Roth writes well enough, for me to recommend this book, if not be enthusiastic.

The book begins at the funeral of its protagonist. The remainder of the book, which ends with his death, looks mournfully back on episodes from his life, including his childhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where he and his older brother, Howie, worked in his father's shop, Everyman's Jewelry Store. He has been married three times, with two sons from his first marriage who resent him for leaving his mother, and one daughter from his second marriage who treats him with kindness and compassion, though he divorced her mother after beginning an affair with a 24-year-old Danish model, who subsequently became his third wife. Having divorced her as well, he has moved in his old age to a retirement community at the New Jersey shore, where he lives alone and attempts to paint, having passed up a career as an artist early in his life to work in advertising in order to support himself and his family.

The unnamed everyman, while an ordinary man and not a famous novelist, has much in common with Philip Roth; he is born, like Roth, in 1933; he grows up in Elizabeth, six miles away from Roth's native Newark; and he recounts a series of medical problems and a history of frequent hospitalization similar to that of the author.

Philip Roth's "Everyman" is a short novel about American male mortality. I was cynical about reading the book, thinking it was just Roth begging for the Nobel Prize that he shouldn't have to be begging for. But it is a beautiful book, concise and poignant. Starting w/ the narrator's funeral, the essential people in his life are analyzed and revealed, and how they shaped his life becomes apparent, the sense of love and loss, the need to connect; but also the difficulty of relations w/ other people. Though it seems to be a novel obsessed w/ death, it's really a novel full of life. His encounters with the widower with the bad back in his retirement home art class, the young female jogger, and the gravedigger were memorable and touching in their emotional tact. A terrific novel.

I know why people like Philip Roth. I understand why people of a certain age and income level really like "Everyman." He's a great writer. I can't really find fault with the way he put the book together. Same with "American Pastoral" (though I did think it a little longer than necessary). And I imagine that I could go on reading Roth and being impressed with his skills and observations. And I'll probably read a few more of his books this summer.

But ultimately, I believe his skill comes in making a fundamentally tedious experience--the experience of middle class America--interesting.

I know that's not fair. A good book is about more than it's subject. But I can't think about "Everyman" without getting mildly angry. I felt no sympathy for the protagonist, and little more for the characters that surround him. The ends of their lives were faced with all the comforts and privilege of middle America. The protagonist in "Everyman" recognizes his mistakes, he examines them, turns them over as though they were curious relics.

It is a good book on a somewhat well worn subject.

Philip Roth's "Everyman" is a short novel about American male mortality. I was cynical about reading the book, thinking it was just Roth begging for the Nobel Prize that he shouldn't have to be begging for. But it is a beautiful book, concise and poignant. Starting w/ the narrator's funeral, the essential people in his life are analyzed and revealed, and how they shaped his life becomes apparent, the sense of love and loss, the need to connect; but also the difficulty of relations w/ other people. Though it seems to be a novel obsessed w/ death, it's really a novel full of life. His encounters with the widower with the bad back in his retirement home art class, the young female jogger, and the gravedigger were memorable and touching in their emotional tact. A terrific novel.

I know why people like Philip Roth. I understand why people of a certain age and income level really like "Everyman." He's a great writer. I can't really find fault with the way he put the book together. Same with "American Pastoral" (though I did think it a little longer than necessary). And I imagine that I could go on reading Roth and being impressed with his skills and observations. And I'll probably read a few more of his books this summer.

But ultimately, I believe his skill comes in making a fundamentally tedious experience--the experience of middle class America--interesting.

I know that's not fair. A good book is about more than it's subject. But I can't think about "Everyman" without getting mildly angry. I felt no sympathy for the protagonist, and little more for the characters that surround him. The ends of their lives were faced with all the comforts and privilege of middle America. The protagonist in "Everyman" recognizes his mistakes, he examines them, turns them over as though they were curious relics.

It is a good book on a somewhat well worn subject.

I found this short novel to be an excellent portrait of humankind. Bleak, but true, life without purpose is empty and depressing. As Everyman shows so clearly, man left to himself will be selfish, frustrated and full of complaint. I believe the following quote from the book gives the reason for the main character's sad, harmful life, "Religion was a lie that he had recognized early in life..." This shallow and uneducated philosophy resulted in the depressing life which Roth so realistically portrays in narrative. What is especially sad about the message of this book is found in the title. The life of the main character is not only hopeless and dismal, but unfortunately this is the life of the `everyman,' that is, of the average American.

The life focused completely on self and the pleasures one can chase without regard to others is the antithesis of a biblical world view. The result of this hedonistic, narcissistic philosophy of life is reflected in a quote from the main character in the book, "you are born to live and you die instead." Philip Roth hit the nail on the head with this quote. Life does has purpose and true life is meant to be had by all. However, mankind often only experiences death, even in living. The main character experienced death and frustration even though his life was full of potential. I loved this book and the statement it makes about the `everyman' of American society. The book is written very well, and with it being so short, it can be read easily in a few hours.

When you first begin reading Roth's latest, you wonder if he is trying to drive readers away. At first blush, the story seems overwhelmingly depressing--not exactly something to cheer somebody up who has had a rough day. After all, the story commences with the central character's funeral and then works backward through a long series of physical and emotional traumas. I initially thought the book was designed for folks like me, older who had gone through serious surgery and begun to reflect on life and its dimensions. Then I came to see that the book would be an interesting departure for younger folks--perhaps they would benefit even more than codgers such as myself. The novel unfolds with Roth's consummate skill as an author--moves quickly (at under 200 pages) and never drags. Nonetheless, there is no avoiding the fact that this is serious and depressing stuff--particularly the focus on the physical deterioration that accompanies aging. Obviously, Roth is not afraid to confront a major challenge in writing such a story, and I think he pulls it off rather well. A truly unique and challenging novel that will grab readers if they keep with it and don't get scared away. It is well worth the journey.

' I read relatively little fiction and, except for detective
stories, even less contemporary fiction. But I was greatly
rewarded by reading Philip Roth's Everyman*. It is the
story of the life of a man who feels that he is dying as he
goes through the last twenty or so years of his life. He is
Jewish, has gone through three marriages and divorces, and
worked as an art director at a New York advertising
agency. Funny thing: he is not given a name anywhere in the
book--he is only described in third-person terms ("he",
"his", "him"). He is Everyman.

* Everyman, by Philip Roth. Houghton Mifflin, New York
2006 (182 pages)

The story begins as his casket is lowered into a grave in a
rundown Jewish cemetery in New Jersey, a cemetery
founded by his grandfather in 1888. It contains the graves of
his parents and those of many unrelated families. The
mourners at the burial aren't numerous--his second wife
Phoebe and their daughter Nancy, in her mid-30's; his two
sons by his first marriage, both in their late forties and
clearly present only out of duty; his older brother Howie
and his wife; a few former ad agency colleagues; and a few
others who had known him at the Jersey shore retirement
complex where he had been living. His death, at age 71,
came when he was on the operating table undergoing a fifth
operation for vascular problems.

The beauty of this novel is the way that Roth takes the
reader through this man's living, his thoughts, his fears
without causing the reader to really like or dislike him. That
sounds bland, but to me it was all the better.

He was reasonable and kindly, an amicable, moderate,
industrious man, as everyone who knew him well would
probably agree, except, of course, for the wife and two boys
whose household he'd left and who, understandably, could
not equate reasonableness and kindliness with his finally
giving up on a failed marriage and looking elsewhere for
the intimacy with a woman that he craved.

He had a soft manner with many people, such as the other
elderly residents of his complex to whom he gave free art
lessons. And especially with his daughter Nancy, a divorcee
with twin daughters, who truly loved him notwithstanding
his having left her and her mother for his third wife, a
vacuous young thing about twenty years younger than he.

The story flows at an even pace, made all the more
enjoyable by Roth's fine word crafting. As Everyman
contemplates the rest of his life--just a few years before it
ended--he realizes:

Well, he was thrice divorced, a one-time serial husband
distinguished no less by his devotion than by his misdeeds
and mistakes, and he would have to continue to manage
alone. From here on out he would have to manage
everything alone.

There are two wonderful scenes near the end of the man''s
life. One is when he reads an obituary of his former boss at
the ad agency and phones the widow; his humanity comes
through warmly in the conversation. At the same time he
learns of two other colleagues who are hospitalized, one
with depression and the other with prostate cancer. He
phones them and has a very touching conversation with each.

For hours after the three consecutive calls--and after the
predictable banality and futility of the pep talk, after the
attempt to revive the old esprit by reviving memories of his
colleagues' lives, by trying to find things to say to buck up
the hopeless and bring them back from the brink...he''d
learned...the inevitable onslaught that is the end of
life...Old age isn't a battle; old age is a massacre.

The other scene is when he visits the cemetery, which he
will soon inhabit, to be near his parents' graves, he runs into
a black man who is digging a grave. Their conversation is
very mundane. Everyman asks the digger about the
mechanics of digging a grave, hauling away most of the dirt
but keeping just enough to cover the casket after it is
lowered. (He finds that the digger had dug both of his
parents' graves.) The contrast, yet the closeness, of
Everyman and the grave digger--two very different men--is
displayed with grace.

"And you've been doing this work how long?" Everyman asks.

"Thirty-four years. A long time. It's good work. It''s
peaceful. Gives you time to think." is the digger's response.

This was my first reading of Philip Roth''s work. I intend to
read more.

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

Maybe the title of this review is too harsh. Many other reviewers have called Roth's 27th novel a masterpiece, a highly ambitious undertaking, and a book that is at once familiar and new (Publisher's Weekly and The Washington Post's Book World). But I cannot help but think this book, for all its ambition, is nothing more than a failed experiment, one that ultimately brings Roth no closer to his dreams of finally winning the one major prize that has still eluded him: The Nobel Prize.

The book, in many ways, is at least a structural success. We start at the funeral of our protagonist where three of the mourners express their sadness: the man's daughter, an ex-wife, and older brother. From there, Roth takes us back in time to various points in the deceased's life, including his childhood spent working with his brother in his father's jewelry and watch store, a term in the Navy, multiple failed marriages and affairs, and most importantly, his many visits to the hospital. Roth refers to his protagonist as an `average man,' in the hopes of somehow capturing a regular, maybe even normal, American existence. Yet Roth's novel ultimately focuses to the point of obsession on the frailty of the human body. The protagonist's life is framed by his many hospital visits, from a hernia operation to multiple procedures meant to clear out blocked arteries and other issues that arise throughout his body. At one point, the character has seven straight years with a major procedure. With the constant referencing and focus spent on detailing a person's mortality, one can't help but wonder if this is something Roth himself fears. I often find that at some point every writer has to produce something about human frailty and the weakness of the human body. Is this Roth's attempt? Like Woolf, is he haunted by some end fast approaching? Or is this merely a book about a man and the slow process of dying. The title seems to provide both an answer and a great problem that goes unreconciled: if this is the story of an everyman, why the long diatribes focusing only on health and vigor. Are we meant to judge and eventually pity this man who cheated and failed in most aspects of his life? If this were a novel driven solely by plot and characterization, none of these things would be at issue. Yet here, where we are almost put on the spot to judge the outcome of this man's life, set up masterfully by the funeral opening, we have to look at least on a more than superficial level at the judgments one inevitably comes to when you read a book by Roth, someone whose novels have always carried a certain political and moral charge to them. What we're left with after weighing the thin book is not much of anything, really.

If this book was meant to somehow make Roth's case for the Nobel that much stronger, I am sad to say that it has failed. The structure, the strongest, yet also the most flawed aspect of the novel, never allows us to care about the protagonist and what has happened to him, meaning that at no point do we ever reflect on some of the obvious fears we all share concerning our own mortality, something the novel seems to drive at from the very beginning. The ending seems too compact, a little too neat and tidy in that we are finally brought back to the operation that ends his life. There's something too artificial in it and it really detracts from many of the weighty issues Roth sounds off on.

I will finish by saying that this is simply a book to read if you have nothing more pressing or urgent calling to you from the long list of books sitting on your bookshelf.

Philip Roth may be our greatest living fiction writer today. He certainly is esteemed for his body of work and I can personally attest for that sentiment myself. 'Everyman' is a heart-breaking tale of mortality and the evaluation of one's life when confronted with its eventual occurence. Roth's language is beautifully poetic when depicting the contemplation of death and its finiteness, and basic and raw when revealing the mundane and uneventful years spent in isolation and deteriorating health.

This is a serious work that is not encouraged for readers who are easily depressed or shaken by dark subject matter. How short are our lives really? How little time is there until these same feelings begin to crop up for ourselves? I'm 26 years old and I couldn't help but reflect on these questions upon my reading. Though Roth's story is negative and nihilistic, this book hit me with the resurging need to live life to my fullest, and I believe that this was Roth's intention. Like all great books, "Everyman" touched me personally. As I read it, Roth seemed to be telling me, 'when you are elderly and you know your life is ending, you want to have limited regrets and leave here as peacefully as possible, so make sure to enjoy life while you still can.'

We'd like to believe that we won't have to feel that morbid when we reach that age, but after reading this and perceiving the attitudes of most elderly people, I imagine it's unavoidable.

Philip Roth writes like an angel. That is what redeems what is otherwise a depressing extended obituary of a Man of our Times who has lived a "good" but ultimately empty and meaningless life.

Our hero had a long career and an unfulfilling retirement. The wives and children he left along the way are lost to him. Friends are dead and dying. The past is gone irretrievably and the future is hopeless. His remaining years are counted by inpatient admissions, and life's eternal unanswered riddle is reduced to "What did the doctor say?"

Roth does not succeed in making us care about his self-centered protagonist, but we do come to understand and perhaps in some small way mourn for him. One only wishes that between his angioplasties and endarterectomies he had remembered to take his Elavil. The story might have had a happier ending.

I read "Everyman" in one sitting, and it was moving and painful. I choose to read this book as a tale of regrets, rather than of death. The nameless protagonist is an average guy, a successful former executive, married three times, three kids, alone in his 70's. He had a wonderful childhood, a loving second wife, and a supportive older brother, but he realizes he threw it all away by foolish choices. He is enraged by his poor health and lack of a sex life, has no direction in retirement, and is beginning to lose friends through the inevitable diseases of old age. How lonely, how very sad--and all of his own choosing.

Roth is at his best here, as he once again gets inside of the American male psyche. He makes the reader want to shake this guy! I put this book down thinking that "We have time" has got to be the most foolish phrase in the English language. We don't.

Oh man, oh every man, what an amazing book! Thank you Philip Roth. To me (yes, at 74) this is the best one yet!

Our "tubular bodies" taking waves. Yes, this was exactly it. Thanks for putting it into words.

I remember back when this book was first released, I simply could not fork over the hardcover price for something so thin. In retrospect, I'm glad I waited for the soft cover.

I can't say I disliked Everyman, but I also can't say I especially liked it. Roth is an expert wordsmith and his plot and characters are well conceived, and the actual structure of the timeline in this story is interestingly executed, but it's ultimately a story that I simply did not care about. Perhaps it is geared towards an older crowed due to its dealings with elderly mortality, and, as a younger man, I had trouble relating.

That said, Roth is certainly deserving of all the accolades he's collected over the years, but in the end, Everyman did not capture this reader's imagination.

~Scott William Foley, author of Souls Triumphant

I think when you read Philip Roth you savor every sentence and image, you sip and sip slowly. Everyman is a cascade of detail and reality that pools around your feet and you don't question a moment or a line of dialogue or an image or a feeling. It is what is -- tenaciously real and gripping. Everyman provides an inexorable feeling of dread mixed with sheer wonder about the urges of men, at the inner workings of the pscyhe. The main character is so unique, in a way, and yet (based on the title) so universal. Hard to argue that this isn't up there with The Human Stain, American Pastoral and all the other great Roth works.

Forgive the puny title of this review - you see, I just have to do something whimsical to cheer myself up after reading this unrelentingly depressing book. Roth probably intends for his short work to be a brisk bucket of ice-water into the face of any cherished illusions about mortality one desperately clutch at, and the spare design of the book's cover permits no (visual) ebullience, either; a fair warning, indeed, of the very dismal (and, after a while, rather dull) subject-matter within.
So, what can Everyman offer, then, for the discearning reader? Well, the writing is pretty good, which is what one would expect from an author of Roth's pedigree. Moreover, one can take a certain, grim comfort in Roth's (and Everyman's) unsparingly brutal, unflinchingly honest look at illness, old-age and death. Roth seems to believe that, by doing so, a certain dignity is bequeathed to an otherwise ultimately puzzling, and increasingly ever more painful existence. In fact, in reading some of the positive reviews of this work, what stands out is how very appreciative many people are of Roth's stark honesty, giving voice, as it were, to those who have no recourse (anymore) but to face up to life's biggest challenge, the big (D)eath.
But let's face, too much of this sort of thing will, just as often, make a reader want to reach for the pills or gun even sooner than otherwise. After enduring Everyman, the only antidote to fight such bleakness is a complete immersion into the very thing that Everyman would, undoubtedly shun (and shudder over much more than his own demise), namely: psychic mediums, with their promises of a glorious afterlife for us all. For this reader, however, a rosey glow of angel wings is merely the opposite extreme of Roth's vampire-like ability to suck out any and all hope one may hold of existence beyond the grave. Accordingly, I am taking the middle path: I will hope for an afterlife of some sort, prepare, as best I can, for None (by-the-by, can Any of us Truly comprehend non-existence, including Roth? I think not), and, in the Mean time, divert myself via heaps of celebrity trivia, globs of junk food and mindless infotainment. Well, it's the American way, after all, until it all blinks out (hey, who are those people at the foot of my hospital bed? My god, it looks like the young Lucille Ball...and...Helen Reddy! Can that be right? Are They leading me onto this pretty rainbow bridge? Well, Gee. Who'da thunk it???...)

Roth's "Everyman" is a manifest for the inevitable: death. Roth presents the reader with a multi-dimensional protagonist that elicits both sympathy and scorn, albeit in the end one can't resist feeling sympathetic since the character's death is, at once, ill-timed -- yet timely. The protagonist's maxim, "There's no remaking reality...Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes", embodies but one of the themes permeating this novel and, in addition, speaks to the reluctant resignation to death and the ills that precede it.

Not a leisurely read. Everyman depicts regret and dying, illuminating the choices we make daily and their profound effects. Though the subject matter invokes thoughts of our own endings, it's something we will all face. Perhaps through reading Roth's Everyman, these choices won't come at knee-jerk speeds. Roth's ability to craft characters with whom to commiserate along with his ability to leave lasting images is admirable. After reading the novel, I reread the opening scene to let it all sink in, which is in fact more somber than the end.

This splendid book has as its protagonist an initially unreflective, average sensual sort of man who's resented bitterly by his two older children, though loved unexpectedly by his young daughter. Isolated from all he's known and from just about every other bond that might tie him to life, he languishes on a contemporary kind of "heath," a retirement home at the Jersey shore. He conceives late in the book the idea of returning to New York and finding a pad to share with this one loving daughter, but such a happy end to his isolation, any more than to Lear's, is not to be. Instead, he winds up in the graveyard where his parents' bones lie, and he chats there with a witty gravedigger, reflecting as unsparingly as Hamlet before him that life's joys are fleeting, that immortality through verse or one's grandchildren are "fallacies in duration," that whatever the case "the paths of glory lead but to the grave." Roth's novel is a brilliant work of the profoundest despair. Its vision of life, surely a possible one, is that life is all there is, that the hope for some better state after death is hogwash, and that for human beings everywhere, then, "ripeness is all," for there is always much to endure here and little to enjoy. Fleeting moments of love or charity are the only occasions of light in the otherwise overwhelming darkness. Some commentators, I think incorrectly, are trying to foist a positive religious meaning on the book, but it could be called "religious" only in the sense that it raises and takes seriously the ultimate questions of human existence, as does, say, Lucretius' "De Rerum Natura." But no reader with his head on straight would confuse Lucretius with, for instance, Dante. What Roth has done is examined the human condition from the standpoint of existentialist reason alone, apart from any consideration of possible revelation or the promises of higher authority. If we grant the artist his donee, it's hard not to conclude that Roth has here proceeded upon it stunningly.

Everyman is an intimate story of death - what the main character calls "life's most disturbing intensity." It is death as a physical, medical, slow/fast-moving affliction of old age, something terribly concrete and unsuited to all the euphamistic flights of poetic fancy we use to convince ourselves that it is something noble and profound. We tell each other that death is "what makes us human," or that it's reassuringly "natural" (as if natural was necessarily good), but now that everyman is looking at it every time he looks at his face in the mirror and feels the dry weight of his own deteriorating body, it is clear that "once one has tasted life, death does not even seem natural."

The book is about the decline of the body as the unavoidable, universal human experience. There are degrees, of course; some people live to their deaths with perfect health, others spend their last days in intractable pain. But every man and woman, unless they are spared by dying suddenly and unexpectedly while still young, is confronted by the sheer felt presence of finality hovering over their minds and bones and organs.

It is also about the regrets and nostalgias that overcome the dying everyman. To me, Roth's character has a bit too many dramatic regrets to make him a convincing "everyman" - multiple affairs, children who won't speak to him, all conspiring to make his last days lonely and shut off. The terror of his experience was partly derived from circumstances having less to do with death itself than with how he had lived his life. Roth might have been even more successful in conveying the starkness of death if he had surrounded his dying person with loving friends and family. If Roth's aim was to describe death as horrible per se, he would have done better to give his character supports that could in no way reduce that horror.

Of course, it may be that his goal was actually to describe not the horror of death in general, but the horror of a death closing on a life dominated by regrets instead of joys. I came away much more aware of the reality of my own death, but also very hopeful that, if I continue to avoid doing things that I will really regret on my deathbed, it will be a less unpleasant experience for me. But the title makes me think he really was trying to get us to think more attentively about old age and dying, not just about old age and dying as experienced by someone for whom youth and health produced mostly fleeting pleasures and pained memories. Insofar as this is the case, I thought the novel made its point less convincingly than it might have.

But the descriptions of old age and of the thought processes of a man for whom the hospital has become unbearably familiar are nevertheless deeply affecting. Roth's everyman speaks of "the prospect of coming steadily to be dominated by medical thoughts to the exclusion of everything else;" of "the aimless days and the uncertain nights and the impotently putting up with the physical deterioration and the terminal sadness and the waiting and waiting for nothing;" of "the rage and despair of a joyless sick man unable to steer clear of prolonged illness's deadliest trap, the contortion of one's character;" of wondering if "the best of old age" is nothing more than "longing for the best of boyhood;" of the pressure "to prevent your mind from sabotaging you by its looking hungrily back at the superabundant past;" of the times when there is "nothing but the pain," and "pain makes you so alone;" of the "longing for the last great outburst of everything;" and of the constant awareness of "a stone, the heavy, sepulchral, stonelike weight that says, Death is just death - it's nothing more."

Roth is yet another depressing American novelist - though not as depressing as Franzen, and I think less cynical - but here he persuades you that depressing is the only way to write about death and dying. Varnishing it with false sentiments and protests about its mystery and nobility only make us less able to die well, as far as that is possible. We must see it for what it is - a time of fear and pain and nauseating anticipation - if we are to in any way deal with it for what it is. Maybe we can master our fear of death; maybe we can avoid living the sort of life that makes death even more fearful; but we cannot avoid the physical, material reality of dying itself. So perhaps the good, the "edification" that comes from reading a novel like Everyman is that it helps us confront that reality while we still have some strength to fight the mental battle it enjoins. For we will soon discover that "[o]ld age is a battle . . . if not with this, then with that. It's an unrelenting battle, and just when you're at your weakest and least able to call up your old fight."

With 'Everyman', Roth holds up the mirror and takes a good lasting, painful look at not just the body of his protagonist as it begins to fail him, but keynote points in the life that precedes his ultimate death.I found it profoundly affecting and more than a bit unsettling, perhaps because so much of the physical demise of this character and his surrounding peers is similar to what I've watched my own parents going through. I found much of the slim novel terribly depressing, but extremely accurate.

Everyman, the son of a Jewish jeweller in New York, had an irresistible urge to paint when he was young and so made a considerable success as an art director and later as the creative director of an advertising agency. Now that his health is ailing and because he is a vulnerable, assailable and confused man, he is haunted by the thoughts of dying. He suffers from the occlusion of his major coronary arteries, he has to undergo surgery and he is no longer able to lead a self-sustained life and has to move to the Starfish Beach retirement village at the Jersey Shore. Now eluding death has become the central business of his life and bodily decay his major preoccupation. He soon notices that his regular hospitalisations have made him lonelier and a less confident man that he was at the beginning of his retirement. He feels displaced at the Starfish Beach home just when age demands that he be rooted somewhere.

If this novel reflects Mr Roth's own preoccupations, then they are very bleak indeed. There is not much optimism in Everyman's reflections but then this is perhaps how some people feel when they have the tendency to be hypochondriacs and their relatives don't show much interest in them anymore...

Philip Roth is the "single best writer of fiction of the past 25 years." No joke. It was in the New York Times. Sure you could accuse them of being myopic and New York centered for saying this, but they're the New York Times and you're just an everyman. Actually, that may be going too far since Roth's everyman dates models and shares numerous biographical details with Roth himself. Sorry if you thought you'd find something to relate to in Everyman.

Everyman does start off all right with the funeral of the main character, but soon the funeral is over and the novel descends into flashbacks of every trip to the hospital that Everyman has taken. By page 100 I was ready to subtitle this book: a chronicle of sickness. But Roth drops the hospital fetish soon thereafter and picks up a hot european dish. Everyman worked at an ad agency, doing what, I'm not sure, but he meets advertising models. He, at age 50, by the way, has an affair with a Danish one. Key quote: For the first two days he was always diddling around her a** with his fingers while she went down on him, until finally she looked up and said, "If you like that little hole, why don't you use it?" Roth makes further references to the hole with pubescent glee.

The final arc of the book relates Everyman finding out all his colleagues are dying or dead. He calls them or their widows. He relates stories of the great things they used to say. And then Everyman dies.

This ridiculous thing isn't a novel, it's something that should have been published in a men's magazine and forgotten. Thank god it was short.

Philip Roth's latest offering is a beautifully written contemplation of the mortality that each of us must face. The protaganist's journey through life as a son and brother, father and frequent husband, punctuated by life-threatening illnesses along the way, strikes one as a warning to revel in life's beauty and bounty during the short while that we are here.

Roth's character envies his wealthy and successful brother's robust health, but his brother loves him unconditionally, eulogizing the protaginist in the first few pages of this slim novel. After dispatching with his main character at the outset, Roth then takes us back through a man's life and loves and full circle to his end.

The warning to us all comes through one of the protaginist's doctors when the character complains following a hospitalization that he does not want to miss the fall. The doctor tells his patient that he really doesn't get it and that he nearly missed everything.

Roth's beautiful use of the ocean of the Jersey shore as a sort of welcoming presence of some, possibly, afterlife experience is memorable.

I think of Roth along with his contemporaries John Updike and sadly, the recently departed Saul Bellow, as the greatest American voices in literature and Philip Roth's latest book does not disappoint.

Everyman is a well written, quick read about the death and final years of a Jewish guy from New York, and it serves as my introduction to Phillip Roth. Now, I'm a fan of novels about death and the finality of our existence. The Stranger by Camus and The Trial by Kafka are a couple of books that have affected me greatly. I consider them favorites, in fact. So it's not that the subject matter is too bleak. It's not that when the end finally comes, this guy can look back on a string of failures and regret, bitterness and jealousy. It's not that he's lived, in his own estimation a purposeless, godless, debauched life. Though that certainly is the case, and the depraved, gratuitous descriptions of some of those moments might be reason enough not to bother with this book. The main character really does live for himself. He betrays almost everyone. And in spite of questionably good intentions and some mild guilt, his is a life that no one respects and his death is desperate and lonely. And that's it. There's no redemption. There's not much story. And really there's no point. A good novel doesn't have to be life affirming and hopeful and redeeming to be good. But there has to be some life. There should be a challenge, a compelling story or an interesting or well developed character. But apart from well crafted sentences, there's really nothing to like or appreciate here. And this is my complaint. Roth could be explaining this book in the voice of the main character when he says: "Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work." This book is like reading someone's work. This is what Phillip Roth does for a living whether the inspiration is there or not. This is a work of occupation, not a work of art. I don't question the author's place in American fiction or the mastery of his craft, but ultimately that's all he has going for him in this book. If there's a message here it's this: Life is short. Thankfully, so is the book.

'Everyman' is an amazing and (I find) amazingly misunderstood book by a brave author; this work is an unflinching, masterfully-executed though ultimately depressing examination of human mortality which has prompted more than one critic, upset at the book's refusal to pander to a Dr. Phil mentality and incensed by its implications, to make like an ostrich. The criticism that the book is 'slight,' somehow 'reductive[!],' 'unpersuasive'[!]- or 'wispy' as the apparently unbalanced "Reader 100" has put it above - is ridiculous. Brevity is necessary where such works are concerned. But perhaps such melancholy yet bantamweight works as The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy, or The Gentleman from San Francisco by Bunin, or Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, or any number of Chekhov's stories, could also be condemned on the same grounds. All of these books are upsetting, even maddening, to an intelligent reader, and summon forth thoughts we would rather not confront. How dare someone write about such things, without pandering to a reader's preference for action/love stories/sex/product names/Hallmark sentiments & uplifting denouements? Oh, of course, it must be the author's fault: he or she is merely being ornery, or a lazy bollocks. Yet there is a reason why such books are not novel-length (it would soon become unbearable), and why the machine of plot (seen as so necessary by the unimaginative) is sacrificed to the unravelling of certain, inescapable truths, done so unflinchingly.

Having read each of Philip Roth's books, and enjoyed them all to varying degrees, I know full well that a reader can never know what, exactly, to expect from him next; whether to be amused/bemused, maddened, or angered. The books from Roth that mean the most to me are the Zuckerman books, Portnoy's Complaint, Sabbath's Theater, and the American trilogy - but everything that he's written (with the exception, perhaps, of The Breast) bears the imprimatur of a master, and has certainly changed the way I look at the world, and at myself. 'Maestro' is not too strong a word for this writer. The unpredictable nature of Roth's fiction is a part of what makes his work so exciting. However, the fact that he has not yet won a Nobel Prize is disheartening: are those worthies (so to speak) going to wait almost until the last minute, as they did with Grass?

N.B. Our Alice Munro is about due for a Nobel also, in my opinion.

A realistic - at times candid - look at mortality from a thrice married man, who, at the tail-end of his increasingly frail life, assesses his failures.

Roth presents his protagonist in a sympathetic light, which at times arouses the reader's annoyance with his self-pity and attempts to explain away his philandering ways...

However, the writing is tight and sustains the reader's interest throughout.

'Everyman' is an amazing and (I find) amazingly misunderstood book by a brave author; this work is an unflinching, masterfully-executed though ultimately depressing examination of human mortality which has prompted more than one critic, upset at the book's refusal to pander to a Dr. Phil mentality and incensed by its implications, to make like an ostrich. The criticism that the book is 'slight,' somehow 'reductive[!],' 'unpersuasive'[!]- or 'wispy' as the apparently unbalanced "Reader 100" has put it above - is ridiculous. Brevity is necessary where such works are concerned. But perhaps such melancholy yet bantamweight works as The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy, or The Gentleman from San Francisco by Bunin, or Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, or any number of Chekhov's stories, could also be condemned on the same grounds. All of these books are upsetting, even maddening, to an intelligent reader, and summon forth thoughts we would rather not confront. How dare someone write about such things, without pandering to a reader's preference for action/love stories/sex/product names/Hallmark sentiments & uplifting denouements? Oh, of course, it must be the author's fault: he or she is merely being ornery, or a lazy bollocks. Yet there is a reason why such books are not novel-length (it would soon become unbearable), and why the machine of plot (seen as so necessary by the unimaginative) is sacrificed to the unravelling of certain, inescapable truths, done so unflinchingly.

Having read each of Philip Roth's books, and enjoyed them all to varying degrees, I know full well that a reader can never know what, exactly, to expect from him next; whether to be amused/bemused, maddened, or angered. The books from Roth that mean the most to me are the Zuckerman books, Portnoy's Complaint, Sabbath's Theater, and the American trilogy - but everything that he's written (with the exception, perhaps, of The Breast) bears the imprimatur of a master, and has certainly changed the way I look at the world, and at myself. 'Maestro' is not too strong a word for this writer. The unpredictable nature of Roth's fiction is a part of what makes his work so exciting. However, the fact that he has not yet won a Nobel Prize is disheartening: are those worthies (so to speak) going to wait almost until the last minute, as they did with Grass?

N.B. Our Alice Munro is about due for a Nobel also, in my opinion.

A realistic - at times candid - look at mortality from a thrice married man, who, at the tail-end of his increasingly frail life, assesses his failures.

Roth presents his protagonist in a sympathetic light, which at times arouses the reader's annoyance with his self-pity and attempts to explain away his philandering ways...

However, the writing is tight and sustains the reader's interest throughout.

I have been trying to catch up on modern authors, and this is the first thing I have read by roth and I liked him less than I liked other such as pynchon, mccarthy, morrison, rushdie, or ishiguru. I almost quit reading the book, but since it was a book about death, I knew the most important segment of it would be at the end; and the book did improve. If you are really interested in good meditations on death and life I would say that the book of ecclesiastes, or the death of ivan ilych or even war and peace would be more meaningful reads. If you wanted something atheistic, I would say read for whom the bell tolls, the stranger, or even the poem ode to a nightengale (the epigraph of this book). If you really want to hear what roth says, just read the last fifty pages; the rest did not feel as if it contained much pith and lost focus, shedding no light on death, instead just being the musing of a normal, hedonistic man who made normal mistakes.
I may read another book by roth, but I felt there was a lack of symbolism and no mythological importance to the book. In that way it seemed like a memior written about just any old events, not events aimed at understanding a very important topic.

I understand (but do not necessarily agree) with the reviewers who don't know what this book was about, or thought this man's life was boring with "no good story". To me, that's where the title comes from. Most of us, let's face it, lead boring lives with no real good stories - at least not enough to entertain a novel. Roth tells us that the main character is a typical, average, ordinary man. The brevity of the book also speaks to the brevity and relatively unimportance of our lives, in the grand scheme of things. I love Roth's writing, and found myself looking for meaning in this book - only to conclude that there is no "in your face" opinions or moral lessons here. It's a brilliant essay on existentialism. If you want a compelling page turner, look to some of his other work including the most recent "The Plot Against America".

Phillip Roth is one of our greatest living authors, so picking up one of his books and giving it a try is a low risk proposition. In the case of "Everyman," the subject matter isn't necessarily appealing--it starts with a funeral and we also learn of the man's struggles with illnesses--the writing is nearly pitch perfect, and Roth's storytelling abilities have not diminished as he has aged. While normally a 180-page book would make me feel a bit ripped off, here the size of this work feels about right-- more of a lug around for two days kind of book instead of for a week. Lets hope Roth is already at work on his next book, as his talent level is tough to match. For a much different and I think ultimately more satisfying look at loss I'd recommend "Wolf Boy" by Evan Kuhlman, which is a bit more redemptive, in the end.

I read some of the other middling reviews before posting this one. I'm not a Roth connoisseur but I did enjoy this story very much. This book hit a lot of raw nerves for me. I'm pushing 50. I don't hesitate in recommending this book to those (men especially) who have and have not lived a full life.

This small novel share many of the characteristics of Roth's work.

The existential view of life, the fear of and inevitability of death,sexual passions as life affirming but also destructive when not controlled and the narcisstic protagonist are all present.

YET there are loving relationships, an ex wife, a daughter, a brother, and parents which are felt as important and life affirming if still ambivilant. Also and I think of importance is the more caring and kinder view of family and origins i.e Jewish roots. We have a less angry and maybe more compassionate Roth.

A Terdiman

"Everyman" is another proof of Roth's greatness. A small book in pages yet enormous in every other way: Totally honest and true, ferociously clever,sad, uncompromising and heartbreaking. A perfect expression of what art, literature. fiction, reality, life and prbably death are all about.

roth rules. that dude can write a mean sentence. i'll save you from the praise you can read in the other 118 reviews for this title and i'll get straight to my issue, which is fully technical: THE WORDS ARE TOO LOUD. seriously, my edition of this book is in 12-point type which is great for the sight impaired but awful for the rest of us. gimme the squint-inducing haruki murakami-style 8-point joint any day. yeah, this is picking nits but the gargantuan font size rendered this fabulous book almost totally unreadable. woulda been a shame.

Near the end of "Everyman," one of the characters (who, like most of the characters, is near the brink of death), talks about how his struggle with cancer has inspired him to write his memoirs. "Before you go, you've got to face the facts, Ace. If I live, I'll write some good stuff."

Wishful thinking, perhaps. It's no surprise that much of "Everyman" is autobiographical; many Roth novels are. What's a surprise is how whiny and fatalistic it manages to be. Roth, if you didn't know already, is a literary virtuoso, capable of treating the English language like some kind of deceptively simple utensil. How odd, then, that he would use his art to craft this very short, very dreary tirade against the obstinancy of mortality. "Old age isn't a battle," Roth writes. "Old age is a massacre."

The anonymous title character grew up fiddling about with delicate watches in his father's shop, but apparantly their fragility and their measurement of time's inexorable plod was lost on him. When the ailments of seniority overcome him and his friends, he mopes and flails, bitter (almost) to the last drop. I don't begrudge him this; death is certainly unfair.

But so is "Everyman." So many people kick the bucket in this book, and it seems like all of them would prove more interesting characters than the selfish wretch at its dull, ticking core. I'm not one of those people who think books must have characters that grow or are admirable or heroic. After all, even the despicable among us can be interesting, can teach us more about what we are or want to be. Everyman, on the other hand, is a man with singularly morbid and selfish passions, none of them particularly unique or creative. For example, our protagonist also handled diamonds in his father's shop, and maybe it was that which most impressed him -- imperishable beauty -- because his life's greatest errors are all, in some way, connected with his blind willingness to discard everyone he loves (and who loves him) in favor of sex with young women.

These trysts are described with a cavalier ruefullness, which is what ultimately turned me off the most about the book. Looking back on his lonely, bitter life, Everyman moans over "all his mistakes, all the ineradicable, stupid, inescapable mistakes..." Inescapable? Maybe Roth means that man is not just caught up in the whims of mortality, but is also at the mercy of his own nature. Perhaps Edmonton could write a new song for Roth's title character: "Born to be Pathetic."

Nah. I don't buy it. We are not our lives; we are what we do with our lives, and Roth's Everyman pretty much does nothing but complain. He commits his mistakes, over and over, and then alienates everyone who might help him learn to forgive himself. He grows old, but he never grows up. He wants us to believe (as he himself does) that life is a fatal succession of inevitabilities, the most horrible one saved for last. He retires to live by the beach and paint, but his creative outlet grows into a stale mockery of his own passions. It's a shame that "Everyman" itself proves to be an equally stale imitation of the brilliance Roth is known for displaying.