Everyman (Paperback)

by Philip Roth (Author) "AROUND THE GRAVE in the rundown cemetery were a few of his former advertising colleagues from New York, who recalled his energy and originality and..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, New Jersey, Starfish Beach (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. [Signature]Reviewed by Sara NelsonWhat is it about Philip Roth? He has published 27 books, almost all of which deal with the same topics—Jewishness, Americanness, sex, aging, family—and yet each is simultaneously familiar and new. His latest novel is a slim but dense volume about a sickly boy who grows up obsessed with his and everybody else's health, and eventually dies in his 70s, just as he always said he would. (I'm not giving anything away here; the story begins with the hero's funeral.) It might remind you of the old joke about the hypochondriac who ordered his tombstone to read: "I told you I was sick."And yet, despite its coy title, the book is both universal and very, very specific, and Roth watchers will not be able to stop themselves from comparing the hero to Roth himself. (In most of his books, whether written in the third person or the first, a main character is a tortured Jewish guy from Newark—like Roth.) The unnamed hero here is a thrice-married adman, a father and a philanderer, a 70-something who spends his last days lamenting his lost prowess (physical and sexual), envying his healthy and beloved older brother, and refusing to apologize for his many years of bad behavior, although he palpably regrets them. Surely some wiseacre critic will note that he is Portnoy all grown up, an amalgamation of all the womanizing, sex- and death-obsessed characters Roth has written about (and been?) throughout his career.But to obsess about the parallels between author and character is to miss the point: like all of Roth's works, even the lesser ones, this is an artful yet surprisingly readable treatise on... well, on being human and struggling and aging at the beginning of the new century. It also borrows devices from his previous works—there's a sequence about a gravedigger that's reminiscent of the glove-making passages in American Pastoral, and many observations will remind careful readers of both Patrimony and The Dying Animal—and through it all, there's that Rothian voice: pained, angry, arrogant and deeply, wryly funny. Nothing escapes him, not even his own self-seriousness. "Amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work," he has his adman-turned-art-teacher opine about an annoying student. Obviously, Roth himself is a professional. (May 5)Sara Nelson is editor-in-chief of PW.
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Philip Roth's 27th novel is a marvel of brevity, admirable for its elegant style and composition (no surprise), but remarkable above all for its audacity and ambition. It seizes unflinchingly on one of the least agreeable subjects in the domain of the novel -- the natural deterioration of the body. But beyond that, Everyman can be seen as a bid to engage conclusively with the core anxieties that the literary novel exists to confront: How, absent the shadow of God, in new and confusing brightness, shall we decide what we are, how we human animals should judge ourselves and whether we can love our species despite everything?

Everyman begins with its hero's end, his interment. Only three of the graveside mourners speak -- the dead man's daughter, his second wife and his older brother. Ordinary puzzlement, sadness and resignation are expressed: "That was the end. No special point had been made." What follows is a summary retrospective of the protagonist's life. We see him as a dutiful good son who, yielding to his parents' wishes, sets aside his artistic aspirations and, after a tour of duty in the Navy, goes to work in advertising. He prospers, ultimately becoming creative director of a major New York-based firm. His infidelities figure in the breakups of at least two of his three marriages. Along the way, he fathers two sons (they reject him with bitterness for having left their mother) and a hapless daughter, who adores him.

His health abruptly worsens when he is in his early fifties and he has to live through 20 years of episodic but severe medical interventions: many surgeries, including a quintuple bypass. His medical miseries dominate his life. He retreats to an upscale retirement community on the Jersey shore and devotes himself to painting (until he concludes that he has nothing to say in that medium) and to teaching painting to his fellow residents. He hears of colleagues declining, beginning to die off. A last operation for a carotid blockage is fatal.

Roth has taken great pains to craft an archetypical American life for his readers to contemplate. The nameless protagonist "was reasonable and kindly, an amicable, moderate, industrious man," Roth writes. "He never thought of himself as anything more than an average human being." He is l'homme moyen sensuel to perfection, neither good nor bad -- or, rather, about as good as he is bad. He has served his country. He has no visible politics. He is unreligious (he gave up attending synagogue after his bar mitzvah). He has met his obligations -- his material obligations -- to his immediate families, but he has made no wider benefactions that we hear of. In his thought-life, there's nothing distinctive. He is reasonably stoical about his medical ordeals, which are brought to life in harrowing detail by the author, but toward the end he is less stoical.

There is, in truth, more on the negative side of his ledger than on the credit side. He is self-centered to a fault. In conscious envy